As a result of the program, two prototypes have been manufactured that were used to test the feasibility of having many more cores than the conventional amount and proved to be successful.
The Tera-Scale research program is focused on the concept of utilizing many more cores than conventional to increase performance with parallelism.
[4] Intel Tera-Scale is focused on creating multi-core processors that can utilize parallel processing to reach teraFLOPS of computing performance.
This architecture simplifies hardware design at the cost of the increasing the workload on the compiler side meaning more work must be put into programming.
This drawback is offset by the fact that the number of applications that will be run on a Tera-Scale processor is low enough for it to not be too much of a burden on the software side.
Intel responded with a category of software called Recognition, Mining, and Synthesis (RMS) applications which require the computational power of tens or hundreds of cores.
The Intel Tera-Scale research program is not only focused on creating the multi-cored processors, but also the parallelizing applications of today and in the future.
This is a process in which the CPU die, flash, and DRAM would be stacked on top of each other significantly raising the possible memory bus widths.
Intel's research into Silicon Photonics has produced a functional optical bus that can offer superior signaling speed and power efficiency compared to the current buses.