Communications of the ACM
World's First 1,000-Processor Chip
University of California, Davis researchers have designed a microchip containing 1,000 independently programmable processors.
Credit: UC Davis News & Information
Researchers at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) have designed a microchip that contains 1,000 independently programmable processors.
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, says team leader and UC Davis professor Bevan Baas.
The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip, which contains 621 million transistors, has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions a second. The 1,000 processors can execute 115 billion instructions a second while dissipating only 0.7 watts, which is low enough to be powered by a single AA battery, according to Baas.
The KiloCore chip executes instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor.
Baas says applications have been developed for wireless coding/decoding, video processing, encryption, and others involving large amounts of parallel data such as scientific data applications and data-center record processing.
The KiloCore chip was fabricated by IBM using its 32-nanometer complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. "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," Baas says.
From UC Davis News & Information
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