A team of scientists have developed the world’s first microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors, which can compute 1.78 trillion instructions per second, and is thought to be the fastest chip ever designed at a university.
The energy-efficient ‘KiloCore’ chip developed by researchers at the University of California contains 621 million transistors, said researchers.
According to Times of India, the KiloCore is being called the most energy efficient multi-core processor, as the 1,000 processors dissipates only 0.7 Watts, i.e. low enough to be powered by a single AA battery.
“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,” said Bevan Baas, professor at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), who led the team that designed the chip architecture.
As mentioned above, each processor core can run its own small programme independently of the others, making it a more flexible approach than the Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches adopted by processors such as graphics processing unit (GPU).
The Indian Express reported, that the idea behind is to break an application into many small pieces, which can run in parallel on different processors, which enables high throughput with lower energy use.
Researchers said that while other multiple-processor chips have been created, none exceed more than 300 processors, making KiloCore the biggest multi-processor chip.
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