Communications of the ACM
UC Davis Designs Super-Fast, ltra Energy-Efficient 167-Processor Chip
Computer scientists at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) have announced what they believe is the highest clock-rate processor chip designed by a university. The 167-processor digital-signal processing chip, dubbed the AsAP, has a maximum clock speed of 1.2 GHz.
The team built the AsAP chip with high speed as well as energy efficiency in mind, and its novel architectural and circuit features enable it to use less power at slower speeds. For example, 12 chips working together could perform more than 500 billion operations per second, using less power than a 7-watt light bulb.
The chip is very small, highly configurable, and fully programmable. "A battery powering this chip will typically last from several times to 75 times longer than it would under the same workload when powering some of the common commercially available digital-signal processing chips," says UC Davis professor Bevan Baas. "At the same time, with our targeted applications, we're getting several times to 10 times better speed than what is currently available — all with a much smaller chip."
From UC Davis News & Information
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