My wife and I were watching the latest episode of the USA Network show In Plain Sight (episode 203, “A Stand Up Triple”) last night. After the shootout that gets the family into witness protection, the marshals are looking at pictures of the crime scene and Marshal Marshall Mann (Frederick Weller) starts going ga-ga over one in particular. Mary, his co-worker, thinks it’s a naked hooker, but Marshall reveals that it’s the latest 80-core chip (military grade). He even rattles off some uses of the parallel processing power that such a multi-core chip could be applied to. So cool.

If you missed the episode, you can see it online.  Click on the show link above, find the online episodes, and watch from the 38:42 point (the counter counts backwards) to the first commercial break (pink diamond on the slider).  

I’m not sure how Marshall could tell it was an 80-core processor from just the photo of the chip. Sure, dual- and quad-core chip pictures are pretty easy to identify once you know what you’re looking at. But 80 cores? Still, it’s nice to see a bit of technology represented correctly on television. I would have thought something like this would have shown up on Burn Notice first, though.

. Read the rest at Intel.com.