UC Davis has developed the KiloCore, a CPU that (as the name suggests) packs a whopping 1,000 cores — extremely handy for very parallel tasks like encryption, crunching scientific data and encoding videos.
Developed by a team of graduate students at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC, the processor was unveiled at 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu on June 16.
It has the ability to shut down individual cores, the chip can handle 115 billion instructions per second while using 0.7W of power.
The university had IBM manufacture the chip on a relatively ancient 32-nanometer process when the industry’s newest processors are usually made using a smaller, more efficient 14nm technique. However, it raises the possibility of many-core processors finding their way into many mobile devices.
The processor is extremely handy for very parallel tasks like encryption, crunching scientific data and encoding videos as each processor core can run its own small program independently of the others.
Besides being superfast and executing instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor, the chip is the most energy-efficient “many-core” processor ever reported, said Baas claiming that 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.
