Indian engineers at the Intel India Development Centre (IIDC), Bangalore played a key role in development of a fingernail-sized chip contributing about 50 per cent of the work, in terms of logic, circuit and physical design. The chip will render supercomputer performance while using only 62 watts of electricity.

The rest was done at the other research lab in Oregon (US). Intel has developed the world's first programmable processor from a single 80-core chip, while using only 62 watts of power, less than many single-core processors today.

This is the result of Intel's “Tera-scale computing” research aimed at delivering Teraflops— or trillions of calculations a secon— performance for future PCs and servers, said Erraguntla, who leads the 20-member research team at IIDC, which is Intel's largest non-manufacturing site outside the US.

These Teraflops chip also allows super-high bandwidth communications between the cores and can move Terabits of data per second inside the chip. The technology will play a pivotal role in future computers with ubiquitous access to the internet by powering new applications for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of high-definition entertainment on PCs, servers and handheld devices.

“We are also looking at its use in financial calculations, oil exploration, weather predictions, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition,” she said. “Intel has no plans to bring this exact chip with floating point cores to market. However, the learnings that come out of it will be passed on to the product line,” she said.