Intel has launched a set of research projects that aim to deliver terra-scale chips to power next-generation "mega data centres" running hosted applications.

Chief executive Paul Otellini showed off a prototype of the TerraFLOP processor at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The chip features 80 processor cores, each running at 3.1GHz. 

It delivers a combined performance of more than one teraflop and has the ability to transfer terabytes of data per second, Otellini claimed. A production model of the chip is scheduled for availability by 2010. 

"This kind of performance for the first time gives us the capability to imagine things like real-time video search or real-time speech translation from one language to another," Otellini told delegates.

The TerraFLOP is required to power what Intel described as the mega data centres needed to deliver online applications.

Intel cited Google and YouTube as examples of providers that will require this level of computing power. 

The chipmaker predicted that terra-scale servers will make up about 25 per cent of all server sales by 2010.