No, that’s not a misprint in the title. A team of graduate students from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis, have created a chip with one thousand cores. This announcement comes after the team presented the chip at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu last week.

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

Perhaps the most amazing feature is the ability to shut off individual cores to save power since each core is clocked independently. Though, from what we understand from Bevan Baas – the professor of electrical and computer engineering who led the team – even without shutting down cores, the chip is still extremely energy-efficient.

The chip is the most energy-efficient “many-core” processor ever reported,. 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. The KiloCore chip executes instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor. Professor Bevan Baas, US Davis

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