By splitting programs across a large number of processor cores, the KiloCore chip designed at UC Davis can run at high clock speeds with high energy efficiency. Credit: Andy Fell/UC DavisResearchers at the University of California – Davis have just manufactured an amazing chip called the kiloCore. The chip contains 1,000 independently programmed processors incorporating 621 million transistors, and it may be the first 1,000-processor chip ever created.
"To the best of our knowledge, it is the world's first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university," said Bevan Baas, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who led the team that designed the chip architecture. According to Baas, before this accomplishment the maximum number of processors put in a chip was no more than 300, and none had been created for commercial use. The kiloCore was fabricated by IBM using 32 nm technologies.
The efficiency of the chip is astounding—it has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second. In tests the kiloCore executed 115 billion instructions per second and dissipated only 0.7 watts, according to the researchers. If used in a laptop, it can run 100 times faster and more efficiently than today’s fastest CPU. The energy management and savings comes from the fact that each processor can run a small program and be clocked independently from every other processor; therefore, each processor can be shut down to save energy when not in use.
The kiloCore was introduced at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu on June 2016. A news brief from the UC Davis can be found here: UC Davis: World’s First 1,000 Processor Chip.
