A team of scientists has finally developed a microchip that has 1000 processors and is thought to be the fastest chip in the world. This chip has been developed in a university lab.
The team hails from the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The chip is called “KiloCore” chip and has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.
“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.
IBM has used their 32nm CMOS technology for the fabrication of the chip and each processor core on the chip can run their own program. The team has also confirmed that multiple core processors have never exceeded 300 processors.
“This is a fundamentally more flexible approach than so-called Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches utilised by processors such as GPUs; 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,” Baas said.
According to graduate student Brent Bohnenstieh, who is responsible for the development of the principle architecture, each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to further save energy when not needed.
The cores can operate at a maximum clock frequency of 1.78GHz and transfer data directly between themselves without the need for the use of a pooled memory area. Pooled memory has become the bottleneck for the data.
This processor was introduced at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu that took place recently.
