The world’s first microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors, which is capable of computing up to 1.78 trillion instructions per second, is designed by scientists. Scientists believe that this is the fastest processor ever designed at a university. Researchers say that the energy efficient KiloCore chip contains 621 million transistors.
A professor at the University of California, Bevan Baas, who led the team that designed the chip architecture said that 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. Researchers said that other multiple processor chips have been created, but no one is capable of exceeding 300 processors. They say that only few are sold commercially and the remaining are created for research purposes.
Each processor core is capable of running its own small programme independently, which is a fundamentally more flexible approach compared to the Single Instruction Multiple Data approaches that are utilized by processors like graphics processing unit. Baas said their main aim was to break an application up into many small pieces, such that each of them can run parallel on different processors, thus enabling high throughput with lower energy use. A graduate student at UC Davis, Brent Bohnenstiehl, who is also the developer of the principal architecture said each processor is independently clocked, therefore when not needed it can shut itself down to further save energy. Baas added that the cores operate at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GigaHertz, and instead of using a pooled memory area that can become a bottleneck for data they transfer data directly to each other. Therefore this chip is the most energy efficient “many-core” processor ever reported.
