Chip making giant Intel has revealed a prototype chip that contains 48 individual processing cores in a piece of silicon the size of a postage stamp. It is called a Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) and has 1.3 billion transistors, which are the tiny on-off switches that support chip technology. Theoretically, each processing core could run a separate operating system, whereas currently top-end chips for desktop computers usually contain four separate processors. Credit: Intel