Beyond the teraflops: Why Intel really put 80 cores on a single chip

So things that people take for granted, like the basic divide between processing hardware and off-chip I/O hardware, are being questioned as part of the project. Indeed, a big part of the project at this early stage seems to be to provide a venue for asking anew a slew of fundamental questions about system- and network-level architecture, and in looking for answers based on the new assumption that you can put a 80 cores worth of useful hardware on a single chip.