Scientists have designed the world's first microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors, that can upto compute 1.78 trillion instructions per second. The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip contains 621 million transistors, researchers said.
"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 at the University of California, Davis, who led the team that designed the chip architecture.
While other multiple- processor chips have been created, none exceed about 300 processors, researchers said. Most were created for research purposes and few are sold commercially.
Each processor core can run its own small programme 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).
The idea is to break an application up into many small pieces, each of which can run in parallel on different processors, enabling high throughput with lower energy use.