The first 1,000 processor chip in the world has been created, and it is thought to be the fastest chip designed within a university lab. The microchip is made up of 1,000 independent programmable processors and was created by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The energy efficient “KiloCore” chip has a 1.78 trillion instructions per second maximum computation rate and is made up of 621 million transistors. The KiloCore was officially shown during the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu on July 16th.

Bevan Baas, professor of electrical and computer engineering who led the team that designed the chip says to the best of their knowledge it is the world’s first chip of its kind and is the highest clock-rate processor to ever have been created within a university. There have been many other multiple processor chips built, but none have gone beyond about 300 processors according to Baas’ analysis team. Most were created for the sole purpose of research and very few are sold on a commercial level. The KiloCore chip was fabricated by IBM using their 32 nm CMOS technology.

Each processor core is able to run its own small program independent of all others, which makes it fundamentally much more flexible when compared to Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches that have been utilized by processors such as GPUs. The idea is that you want to break an application up into smaller, “bite-sized” pieces, each holding the ability to run in parallel on different processors. This enables for maximum throughput without the need for large amounts of energy.

Since each processor is clocked on its own, it is able to shut down to save even more energy when it is not needed. Graduate student Brent Bohnenstiehn developed the principal architecture. The core operates at an average maximum clock frequency of about 1.78 GHz and data can be transferred directly from one to another instead of requiring a pooled memory area that can become a major bottleneck for data.

Baas says the chip is the most energy-efficient “many core” processor ever reported. The 1,000 processors are able to execute 115 billion instructions in a single second while dissipating by only 0.7 Watts. This is low enough to be powered by one AA battery. The KiloCore executes instructions over 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor.

Applications have already been developed for the chip that include coding, decoding, video processing, encryption, along with a large number of others that involve large amounts of parallel data such as scientific data applications and datacenter record processing. The team has recently completed a compiler and automatic program that is used for mapping tools for the use in programming the chip.