Engineers at the University of California at Davis have built the world’s first 1000 processor microchip or KiloCore chip. Presented at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits. KiloCore is capable of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors. The KiloCore is built from completely independent cores capable of running completely independent computer programs.
The KiloCore chip is a very energy efficient multi-core processor. The independent cores can run at max 1.78 GHz, and can be shut down individually when not in use. The 1000 Core processor can execute 115 billion instructions per second while consuming only 0.7 Watts. The power consumption is so low that a single AA battery can power 1000 core processor. Which makes it 100 times more efficiency than normal laptop processor.
Bevan Baas, professor of electrical and computer engineering said,
“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. This 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.”
