Five years from now, says Intel, your phone could double as a supercomputer.

That’s the goal of Intel’s experimental Single-chip Cloud Computer project, or SCC. The company is now researching potential mobile applications for the chip, as well as developing tools that will make it easier for developers to take advantage of this technology without becoming supercomputing experts.

In other words, as ARM seeks to put cellphone chips into our supercomputers, Intel is doing the reverse. The lines between the mobile hardware and data-center hardware are blurring. That may seem odd at first, but if you step back and look at the bigger picture, it only makes sense. Big-time data-center operations want the ulta-low-power profiles of the hardware in our cellphones, and the mobile world is hungry for the computational punch you get from much larger systems.