A team of US-based scientists have designed world's first microchip that encompasses a whopping 1,000 independent programmable processors capable of computing up to 1.78 trillion instructions per second.
Dubbed as "KiloCore," the energy-efficient chip packs an impressive 624 million transistors, researchers noted.
Bevan Baas, who serves as a professor at the University of California, Davis and spearheaded the group that created the chip framework, noted that "KiloCore" is probably the world's first 1,000-processor chip and also the highest clock-rate processor ever created in a university.
According to the researchers, none among the existing multiple-processor chips surpass 300 processors. While few of them were designed to be sold commercially, most of them were created for the purpose of research.
Each processor core is capable of processing its small programme separately without been dependent on the others, which is basically a more adaptable approach as compared to the Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approach, The Indian Express reported.
Apparently the plan is to divide an application into multiple small pieces, each capable of running in parallel on separate processors, thus enabling high throughput using minimal energy, Bass explained.
Since the chip is capable of shutting down individual cores, using just 0.7 Watts of power, it can execute an impressive 115 billion instructions per second - that's low enough to run it off of a single AA battery, UC Davis noted on its official website.
Breaking with industry tradition of opting for smaller and adept 14nm technique, UC Davis had International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) manufacture the chip on a comparatively outmoded 32-nanometer process. However, this hints a possible use of many-core processors in to an array of mobile devices.
That being said, many-core processors are not completely beneficial, however they can save a lot of time when a mobile device or laptop would otherwise run slowly.
An array of applications including video processing, wireless coding/decoding, encryption and others are already been designed for the chip.
