Azul Systems has announced that the next generation of its Vega processor will feature 48 cores. Produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in a 90-nm process, the 64-bit Vega 2 consists of 812 million transistors. It is designed to power network-attached systems with up to 768 cores, supporting 768 GB of memory, aimed at accelerating Java and other virtual-machines. Such equipment is expected to be available in 2007.