Chipmaker Intel's new chip, called Knights Corner, is capable of running at a speed of one teraflop, making one trillion calculations per second.

Demonstrated on a test machine during a supercomputing conference in Seattle on Tuesday, the single 50-core chip is the first commercial processor based on the company's Many Integrated Core Architecture.

Knights Corner processing capability is the same as the most powerful supercomputer of the world in 1997. In other words, Knights Corner chip is Intel's attempt to highlight how a huge system can now be crammed on a single chip.

Speaking on the topic, Intel's Rajeeb Hazra said, "Having this performance now in a single chip... is a milestone that will once again be etched into HPC [high performance computing] history."

Such a high computing performance is used to work out a wide range of problems in different fields, including car crash simulations, molecular modeling and weather forecasting.

The new chip will help Intel in better competing against rivals like NVIDIA and AMD.

By 2018, Intel aims to deliver chips capable of performing at so-called exascale-level, the performance more than one hundred times faster than the currently available.