The gains could be huge. A simulated 36-core chip ran up to 30 percent faster just by adopting Jenga, and could use up to 85 percent less power. You wouldn't necessarily face a penalty for having many cores in a chip, even in laptops and smartphones where every watt counts.

Of course, there's one major problem: Jenga is just a simulation. It could take a while before you see real-world examples of this cache, and longer still before chip manufacturers adopt it (assuming they like the idea, that is). This also assumes that Jenga scales neatly across different core counts. Will you see similar gains with 'just' an 8-core chip? It's easy to imagine CPU giants like Intel or Qualcomm leaping on this concept, though. Chip makers frequently boost performance by moving to ever-smaller manufacturing processes, but they're gradually running into physical limits. So long as there's software to take advantage of it, Jenga could wring extra performance out of chips with relatively little effort.