When my brother took a job at Intel's Folsom, Calif. office a year ago, the family mumbled -- the position was taking one of my parents' three grandchildren nearly a thousand miles away. But he was thrilled, as he'd be working on every engineer's dream: a super-chip. In the quest to get ever-more-powerful, Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC) has just announced successful production of a "mind-boggling" chip, one that can process 1 trillion calculations per second. Mind-boggling indeed: I can't even conceive of that speed and now understand why my brother had books on chaos theory by his bedside as a teen.

This is so fast, that every mention of it includes the phrases "revolutionize computing" and "lightning speed," and it makes me feel a tiny bit better that my son Everett can only play with his little cousin on holidays. The chip, which has a huge market in Wall Street's financial analyses (which could be done in seconds instead of the days they now take), physics, and gaming, will be ready for the market in about five years.

In which time software makers like Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will have to scramble to develop systems that can operate on so-called "multicore" chips. According to BusinessWeek, software which takes advantage of two-core chips hasn't even been developed as of yet -- four, eight, 80 (that's what Intel's chip can hold)? Now the developers' minds are a-boggling. I don't quite get it, but the new chip layers memory in three dimensions, allowing it to be both fast and energy-efficient.

It's proof that, not only will my children have fantastic video games in 2012, but my brother should keep his job. Guess we'll have to start springing for trips to California -- I have another niece on the way!