Well Intel have now unveiled the first 50-core chip, codenamed “Knights Corner”.  This 22 nanometer monster uses a new x86 core architecture and it’s clearly not intended for your PC.

Before you get all disappointed, Windows isn’t even optimised to use that many cores so they’d just sit idle.  It’s based on their now cancelled 48 core Larabee graphics processor and uses a grid of cores, all joined together by a network to keep the data flowing between each one at high speed.

There’s no release date yet but that doesn’t mean they’re resting on their laurels.  Intel are already readying a developer kit to help programmers make the most of the multi-multi-core processing these chips are capable of.

The chip, revealed today by electronista, isn’t tied to any particular software platform and will probably be in use in supercomputers in a few years crunching data on medical conditions and global warming.

The process manager displays a list of processes currently running on the system. By default hidden processes are hidden but they can easily be revealed in the interface. A right-click provides several possibilities to interact with the process. It is possible to open the program directory, perform a Google search, to set the priority of the process, look at its properties and create a rule for it.

The rules are basically permanent changes to the process. Everyone can set a process priority in the task manager but those priorities are reset when the process is killed. With rules users can make those changes permanent as long as the process manager is running in the background.

Even more interesting is the fact that you can set process priorities for visible and minimized applications and set a cpu core affinity and that each instance of the process should be distributed to different cores. Another interesting aspect are the special actions. Those can be defined if a process is started, ended or idle. Actions include to launch another application, to restart the process, to kill it or to show a tooltip.