UC Davis Builds The World First 1000 Core Processor

Forget your quad-core or octa-core CPU setup because the graduate students at the UC Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have built a microchip containing 1000 programmable processor cores making it the world’s first 1000 core processor. This 1000 core processor has been named unimaginatively as the “KiloCore” chip and it has the maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second thanks to its 621 million transistors. The chip was fabricated with the help of IBM using their home grown 32nm CMOS technology instead of the industry standard more efficient 14nm technique.

KiloCore

The speciality of the KiloCore chip is that it can run its own small program independently of others. So the application is broken up into smaller pieces each of which can run parallel on different processors which results in high throughput and lower energy usage. Since each processor is independently clocked at 1.78GHz it can shut itself down when it is not needed. Data transfer has been smoothened by transferring the data directly to one another instead of using a pooled memory area.

According to Bevan Baas, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who led the team that designed the chip architecture, the KiloCore chip executes instructions 100 times more energy efficient than a modern laptop. He says that the 1000 processors can execute 115 billion instructions per second while using only 0.7 Watts which in real world terms translates to a single AA battery powering the KiloCore chip instead of some power hungry SMPS.

So where will the KiloCore chip be used? Not for gaming that’s for sure. The team has developed applications for the chip to work in wireless coding/decoding, video processing, encryption, and other situations involving large amounts of parallel data such as scientific data applications and data centre record processing. The team has also developed a complier and automatic program mapping tools for programming the chip.

Source: UC Davis via The world's first 1,000-core processor is here | Windows Central

Replies

  • Kaustubh Katdare
    Kaustubh Katdare
    Looks like my future smartphone will find the next biggest prime number while charging.

    😛

You are reading an archived discussion.

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