Intel has recently demonstrated a computer chip that is expected to deliver eight-core processing to the market by the second half of next year, but the company is thinking far beyond that.

Andrew Chien, the director of Intel Research, is looking beyond eight-core chips and into the range of terascale computing, in which machines with tens or hundreds of cores perform trillions of operations every second.

The obvious question is: what will we do with those machines? You hardly need that kind of power to run a spreadsheet or blog. Chien foresees a world where computers are everywhere and nowhere. This is an idea that’s been around awhile – ubiquitous computing.

Chien: Imagine you have a phone that could be aware of when I get into a line at an airport. There’s a difference about what you want to be interrupted with when you’re being idle, standing in a line, [versus] when you’re going through the security procedure. Imagine if the sensor detects your motion and other information from your environment, such as the Internet signal, and it has knowledge of your past behaviors, so it can actually figure out if it’s crucial that the incoming phone call goes through. Is it your five-year-old who’s upset, or is it a friend who you talk to all the time? Do you need to take that call right away? The intelligent system could be using sensors, analyzing speech, finding your mood, and determining your physical environment. Then it could decide how that notification came through and how it came through in that context.

Why not strong AI in your pocket? That could be useful for many things beyond call screener.

Auto-drive automobiles (or aircraft) could use powerful, cheap computation. Everything from toys to appliances to power tools would “wake up.”