What they need is to increase the speed of the processor. Intel isn't even in the phone market now. Why don't they increase ghz again?
I am very sure this isn't even standard Intel R&D making this, it seems like Intel's Tera-Scale R&D Program which has been working on things like this for years now. Their entire goal since they started was to make CPUs that can scale to huge amounts of cores (I think 1,000 cores is a goal for them) and this might just be a side thing for them. As for software, well if the hardware isn't seen as coming eventually then why would software makers make their software work with many cores? This is proof of concept stuff that will lead the way for better OSes eventually that can make use of all these cores.As Intel gets behind in the mobile market, losing its position quickly, they came up with this lame idea to boost public's attention to themselves.
The article, of course, is absurd, same as the idea itself. Our desktops fail to take full advantage of 8-core systems, nevermind 12-core ones that one gets from Intel today (counting the Hyper-Threading).
If you remember Intel's first dual core CPU was just 2 normal CPUs glued together so putting 6 or 8 of them together would not have worked out well. Even their Core 2 Quads were just 2 dual cores on top of each other, these types of things work in stages you can't jump to 16 core without making sure that 2 cores work without blowing up.When they came out with duo core phone processors I was thinking facepalm why not just skip to 8 or even 4? I suppose they need to squeeze every last cent out of the consumer.