Today you can get two-core, four-core and eight-core chips. Intel is telling us that hundreds or thousands of cores are possible in the near future:

- Intel: an expensive many-core future is ahead of us

- Intel says to prepare for ‘thousands of cores’

All these cores take us in two directions. The first is more supercomputer-like desktop and laptop machines. If you have machine with a thousand cores and a gigabyte of cache, that is looking a lot like a supercomputer. Looking at this video, that sort of thing seems very possible:

Intel is predicting 8 nanometer chips in less than 10 years.

The other possibility is hundreds of cores dedicated to graphics, as described here:

This possibility is known as Larabee.

Intel has already demonstrated an 80-core chip. They call this idea Terascale: