Processor technology has certainly come far, with a host of different materials and techniques being implemented to increase speed and power. And now, we have a new kind of development. A team of scientists at UC Davis made the world’s first 1000-core processor.

The team has unveiled the KiloCore, a CPU that has 1000 cores and all the speed that come with that kind of power. The chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.

It also boasts energy-efficiency, thanks to its ability to shut down cores when not in need. This is due to the fact that each core is able to run its own small program independently. In fact, the chip can handle 115 billion instructions per second while using 0.7W of power, enough for a single AA battery.

The whole unit works by breaking an application up into many small pieces, each of which can run in parallel on different processors. Possible applications for this chip include wireless coding and decoding, video processing, encryption, and others involving large amounts of parallel data.