Intel expands R&D in Germany to multicore processors

The U.S. chip-making giant is following through on a decision, announced last year, to shift the focus of its lab in Braunschweig away from designing chips for optical networks to developing "many-core" chips with hundreds of processing cores.

The multicore R&D activities are part of Intel's Tera-Scale Computing Research program, which aims to deliver processors with tens to hundreds of cores for computing performance in the teraflops range, the company said. A teraflop is 1 trillion operations per second.

The research program includes not only hardware research but also software and platform development work. Intel expects software applications to change dramatically as a result of teracomputing.

Another area of interest is to find ways to reduce power consumption by microprocessors, enabling notebook PCs and other portable devices to run longer between each battery recharge.

The Braunschweig lab, Intel's largest chip development center in Europe, currently employs more than 100 people. It also works closely with researchers at the renowned Technical University of Braunschweig.