Intel 80 core processor

Intel are showing off:

http://www.intel.com/research/platform/terascale/teraflops.htm

It seems hardware development has a life of its own - who on earth is going to be able to write operating systems and applications that would be able to use even a tenth of the computing power available in these things?

Are you kidding? Have you been to the playchess engine room and seen the quad-cores, dual-cores and xeons in there? Some guy was saying when AMD released theirs in April he would get them.