Intel on the Road to 1000 Cores?

Jack Clark over at ZDNet interviews Intel engineer Timothy Mattson on the prospect of 1000-core processor:

The challenge this presents to those of us in parallel computing at Intel is, if our fabs [fabrication department] could build a 1,000-core chip, do we have an architecture in hand that could scale that far? And if built, could that chip be effectively programmed? The architecture used on the 48-core chip could indeed fit that bill. I say that since we don’t have cache coherency overhead. Message-passing applications tend to scale at worst as the diameter of the network, which runs roughly as the square root of the number of nodes on the network. So I can say with confidence we could scale the architecture used on the SCC to 1,000 cores.