Scientists Develop First 1,000-Processor Microchip In The World

The first 1,000-processor microchip in the world has been developed by a group of scientists from the US. According to microchip news, the new innovation is believed to be the fastest chip ever designed.

Word's first 1,000-processor microchip was designed by a group of scientists at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of California in Davis. The energy-efficient microchip has been named "KiloCore" with a maximum computation level of 1.78 trillion instructions every second and has 621 million transistors.

A microchip atmel news indicates that the first 1,000-processor microchip in the world is the highest frequency processor ever developed in a university. Manufactured by IBM through the company's  32nm CMOS technology, every processor core of the KiloCore chip can run its own program independently from others. As explained by Bevan Baas, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university, the other multiple-processor chips which have been produced have never surpassed the 300 processors until now, Mouser reported.

Prof. Bass also further noted that this is basically a more adaptable method compared to the supposed Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approach being used by other processors like the GPUs - the concept behind this is to split an application up into several tiny bits, with each piece running in parallel and on different processors in order to enable increased throughput with much lower energy consumption.

According to Brent Bohnenstiehl, the graduate student who created the principal architecture, every processor could be able to shut itself down since it is independently clocked, therefore further save more energy when not required. Moreover, the cores run at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GHz. They could also transmit data directly to each other instead of just using the pooled memory area which could eventually become a traffic jam for data.

The world's first KiloCore chip was recently introduced during the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits held in Honolulu, according to Microchip Direct.