World’s First 1,000-Processor Chip (1)

Researchers just created the world’s first 1,000-processor computer chip, the fastest designed in a university lab.

This microchip with 1,000 processor cores was designed by graduate students in the UC Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Image credit UC Davis

Just for comparison, the ‘fastest computer in the world,’ has chips that have 260 cores on them, but it does have 41,000 such chips.

The energy-efficient “KiloCore” chip, has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.

The KiloCore was presented at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu on June 16.

Bevan Baas, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who led the team that designed the chip architecture, 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.”

The KiloCore chip was fabricated by IBM using their 32 nm CMOS technology.

source UC Davis