The chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million tran... Read More

A team of scientists from the US has created the world's first microchip with 1,000 independent processors. Called 'KiloCore' chip, it is also claimed to be the world's fastest chip ever designed at a university. The chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.

Here's all you need to know about the chip

The team

This microchip has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Most 'energy-efficient'

Bevan Baas, professor at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), who led the team that designed the chip architecture, claims that the chip is the most energy-efficient "many-core" processor yet. For example, the 1,000 processors can execute 115 billion instructions per second while dissipating only 0.7 Watts, low enough to be powered by a single AA battery.

Each processor core can run its own program

Each processor core can run its own small program independently of the others, which is a fundamentally more flexible approach than the Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches utilised by processors such as graphics processing unit (GPU). Because each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to further save energy when not needed.

Fabricated by IBM

The chip has been fabricated by IBM using its 32nm CMOS technology. KiloCore's each processor core can run its own small programme independently of the others.

Cores clock-speed

Cores operate at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GHz, and they transfer data directly to each other rather than using a pooled memory area that can become a bottleneck for data.

According to the team, the other multiple-processor chips that have been created till now never exceeded 300 processors.

'Executes instructions more efficiently than many laptop processors'

KiloCore chip executes instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor.

Applications available

Applications already developed for the chip include wireless coding/decoding, video processing, encryption, and others involving large amounts of parallel data such as scientific data applications and data centre record processing.

