Researchers with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis have developed an energy-efficient KiloCore processor that, as the name implies, features 1,000 processing cores.
Built by IBM, the KiloCore has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors. Although built on a dated 32-nanometer manfuacturing process, the chip is still rather efficient as individual cores can shut themselves down when not needed.
Bevan Baas, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who led the team that designed the chip, said it can execute 115 billion instructions per second while dissipating only 0.7 watts – low enough to be powered by a single AA battery. Even as today’s fastest consumer processors have moved to the 14-nanometer FinFET process, the KiloCore executes instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than, say, the CPU you’d find in a modern laptop.
To the best of their knowledge, Bass added, this is the world’s first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university with cores operating at an average clock frequency of 1.78GHz.
The chip is already being used in the areas of wireless coding / decoding, encryption and video processing which involve large amounts of parallel data processing. It could also be useful in the areas of scientific data applications and datacenter record processing, we’re told.
https://www.techspot.com/news/65271-researchers-build-world-first-1000-core-processor.html
