Very soon, we'll be up to 4 cores. Intel is committed to Moore's Law. The company has already showed off a research prototype chip that boasts 80 cores on one die. This new chip is just 300 millimeters square; still have the capacity of exchanging a terabyte or more of data per second. Every core runs at 3.16 GHz.

Intel is even working on replacing wires with optical technology in PCs and chips. This plan dates back to 2001, and resulted as a silicon laser. The laser can be used to help the cores communicating.

Intel assumes these chips to be used in what so called "mega data center," in which the tera-scale chips will run hosted applications. Companies such as Google and YouTube need it for the beginners. Any organization handling that level of data and requires dealing with it.

This is a huge undertaking, and anything can happen coming 5 years. Some firms legislature sounded optimistic about how quickly gaming firms will start manufacturing multi-threaded games for the quad core architecture. The AMD likes to have its own quad core processors out by then; gaming firms will have even more competition.