A team of scientists from the US have developed world’s first microchip that has 1,000 processors. Dubbed as ‘KiloCore’ the chip is said to be the fastest chip designed in a university lab. The chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.
The KiloCore chip has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. It was fabricated by IBM using their 32 nm CMOS technology. KiloCore chip’s each processor core can run its own small programme independently of the others. Other multiple-processor chips that have been created till now never exceeded 300 processors, claims the design team.
As each processor in the KiloCore chip run its own small program independently, it saves energy when not needed. The cores operate at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GHz and transfer data directly. The team further claims that KiloCore chip executes instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor.
Bevan Baas, professor of electrical and computer engineering said,
To the best of our knowledge, it is the world’s first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university.
Baas further states that the KiloCore chip is the most energy efficient multi-core processor. Its 1,000 processors can execute 115 billion IPS while dissipating only 0.7 watts and a single AA battery is enough to power the chip.
Applications already developed for the chip include wireless coding/decoding, video processing, encryption, and others involving large amounts of parallel data such as scientific data applications and datacenter record processing.