We sit here as consumers, feeling content with quad-core processors in our computers (or maybe eight, if you are feeling particularly greedy).  But 100 processors on a single chip?  That's exactly what silicon manufacturer Tilera has done, and it's coming later this year.

Bringing 'ten or twenty years into the future' to the public this year in what could be considered as both awesome and a completely needless venture, the team headed by Anant Agarwal have delivered the world's first 100 core general purpose processor.  Easily adaptable and scalable to any processing requirement, regardless of how strenuous or small it is.

The chipsets are primarily created for the sake of rebuilding servers from the ground up, in the face of companies such as Facebook or Google building their own custom data centres, and the emphasis on lightspeed transfers being more important than ever.

Tilera was a company that has always been a few steps (or cores) ahead of it's competitors: after masses of funding from DARPA, the MIT project (called RAW at the time) released a 16-core chip prototype in 2002.  Who would've thought that we'd get to 100 so quickly!

Source: Tilera