There is finally no limit to processing, as scientists from the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, have created the world's first Microchip that has 1,000 processors, has a maximum calculation rate of 1.780 billion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors, while it is believed to be the fastest chip ever designed in a university laboratory.
The energy-efficient “KiloCore” chip contains 621 million transistors, the researchers say. If you compare that to the world’s first integrated circuit board in 1964, which had only 10 transistors, you can understand the technological advancement that scientists have achieved with “KiloCore.”
"To our knowledge, it's the world's first 1,000-processor chip and it's the highest clock-rate processor ever designed at a university," said Bevan Baas, a professor at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), who led the team that designed the Microchip.
Built by IBM using its 32nm CMOS technology, each processor core of the KiloCore chip can run its own microprogram separately from the others. While other multiprocessor chips have been created, none exceed 300 processors, the researchers said.
"The idea behind the creation is to break an application into many small pieces, each of which can run in parallel on different processors, allowing for high performance with lower energy usage," said Baas.
Graduate student Brent Bohnenstiehl, who developed the core architecture, said that since each processor is clocked independently, it can shut itself down to save extra power when it's not needed. The cores run at an average maximum frequency of 1.78 GHz and pass data directly to each other rather than using a centralized memory area where data can get blocked.
Baas said the chip is the most energy-efficient “multi-core” processor ever reported. For example, the 1,000 processors can execute 115 billion instructions per second while dissipating just 0.7 Watts, which is low enough to be powered by a single AA battery.
Microchip KiloCore executes instructions over 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor.
Applications have already been developed for Microchip, including wireless encoding/decoding, video processing, encryption and others involving massive amounts of parallel data.
KiloCore was recently presented at the 2016 VLSI Technology and Circuits Symposium in Honolulu.
