Intel hints at 48-core mobile processors, to materialize within 5 to 10 years

Think that quad-core processor inside your smartphone or tablet is so awesome? Well, sooner or later, it is about to be dwarfed by newer, more potent silicon. And that's inevitable. You see, technology nowadays evolves rapidly, and what is now cutting-edge hardware usually becomes a mid-range product in about a year. 

So can you imagine what the state of mobile processors will be in, let's say, five to ten years? Intel is already visualizing that and it sees 48-core processors powering both smartphones and tablets. That's twelve times as many as there are in a high-end chip available today! Needless to say, having so many cores on a single piece of silicon would allow smartphones and tablets to handle CPU-intensive tasks with ease by splitting the workload. For example, if someone is watching a high-resolution video, each frame could be decoded by an individual core. Advanced tasks that currently require processing to be offloaded to a computer in the cloud will be performed offline. All the while, Intel promises that such chips will be energy efficient.

However, there are a few obstacles in the way, and one of the most significant ones is the software used on smartphones and tablets today. Simply put, the code is not yet optimized to distribute tasks among so many cores. In fact, even consumer-grade desktop operating systems aren't ready for such chips. That's why we'll have to settle down with what we have today and wait patiently for researchers to finish their work. In the meantime, what cool uses of that processing power can you think of? 3D object recognition? Augmented reality? Protein folding simulations? Let us know down in the comments!