What Would You Even Do with a 48-Core Smartphone?

May all your puny dual- and quad-core smartphone chips cower in fear: Intel has been working on 48-core processors for a few years now, and now the firm is reportedly testing them for use in smartphones and tablets. Now, I know this sounds like some ridiculous number tossed out the grinding forever war of specs, like that 40-megapixel camera in a Nokia, but for once it’s a development that could actually leap computing forward. Why’s that? Because a ridiculously-powerful smartphone could replace every other computing device you own.

Having a chip with multiple cores allows a processor to crunch more discrete tasks at a time. So having a massive number of cores could theoretically be more powerful, and, as is all-important in mobile, very efficient. The catch is that analysts don’t think the tech will be production ready for 5-10 years, although Intel says the chips could be ready sooner. The problem in the meantime is that our systems aren’t coded for such a shift.

“There aren’t many apps now to light up eight cores, let alone lighting up 48,” Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, told Computerworld. “Even on the PC now, it’s really unusual in an 8-core machine to light up more than six cores. Writing for massive multi-core… Well, we haven’t even really started to do that yet.”

But if Intel has its way, massively-multicored mobile devices are in our future. This is huge because, while smartphones and tablets have increasingly eroded the market share of traditional computers, mobile devices’ size, temperature, and battery limitations will keep them from surpassing laptops and desktops in terms of brute power for the foreseeable future. Here’s the thing: If mobile chips start showing up with insane amounts of processing power, will it matter if larger form factors can be even more powerful yet? Or look at it this way: If you could drop your phone onto a wireless dock with keyboard and monitor and use Photoshop or Final Cut seamlessly, why would you ever need a laptop?

Now, let’s bring this back to Earth for a second. All that processing power, even if it’s more efficient with all those cores, is still liable to suck back a lot of battery and run hot. Plus, software really needs to catch up. But Intel isn’t the only group looking to build mega-core processors, and one has even raised $900k on Kickstarter. So the processors of the future are looking to be more capable multitaskers, rather than just faster. Aside from advantages at handling single tasks (like multi-core GPUs, for example), having an absurd number of cores and the software to utilize them opens up a world of computer multitasking we’ve yet to see. So yeah, in the future, you’ll be taking photos, editing video, watching movies, using your phones cameras to create an interactive heads-up display of your world, and talking on the phone all at once, and you’ll never have to take your eyes off your screen again. Doesn’t the future sound fun?

Photo: Intel, via Wired

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.