University researchers make 1,000 core processor with 0.7W TDP

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering announced the creation of a working sample of a 1,000-core processor.

Called the KiloCore, this chip has 621 million transistors and is capable of processing 1.78 trillion instructions per second at its maximum clock frequency of 1.78GHz. The team also mentions that KiloCore is efficient enough to run 115 billion instructions per second at a 0.7W TDP, making it possible to power it via a single AA battery.

Each core can run its own small program independently of the others, making it more flexible than a SIMD approach. KiloCore was made using a 32nm CMOS technology process from IBM, it's the chip with the most cores ever and it's also the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university. Full details at Hexus.

During the presentation of a working KiloCore sample, at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu late last week, we learnt that the researchers have readied a compiler and automatic program mapping tools for use in programming the chip. Applications already developed include wireless coding/decoding, video processing, and encryption. The KiloCore is particularly attractive for scientific data applications and data centre record processing; as such tasks require the processing of large amounts of parallel data.