Researchers at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have created a microchip that contains 1000 independent programmable processors, which has been aptly named the KiloCore.
The new energy-efficient KiloCore chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors and was unveiled last week at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu on June 16th 2016.
Bevan Baas, professor of electrical and computer engineering explains :
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.
The Science Daily website writes :
While other multiple-processor chips have been created, none exceed about 300 processors, according to an analysis by Baas’ team. Most were created for research purposes and few are sold commercially. The KiloCore chip was fabricated by IBM using their 32 nm CMOS technology.
Each processor core can run its own small program independently of the others, which is a fundamentally more flexible approach than so-called Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches utilized by processors such as GPUs; the idea is to break an application up into many small pieces, each of which can run in parallel on different processors, enabling high throughput with lower energy use, Baas said.
Because each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to further save energy when not needed, said graduate student Brent Bohnenstiehl, who developed the principal architecture. Cores operate at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GHz, and they transfer data directly to each other rather than using a pooled memory area that can become a bottleneck for data.
For more information on the new KiloCore jump over to the official websites below for details by following the links.
Source: ScienceDaily : UC Davis : Engadget
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