US university first 1000-processor chip

                Scientists have designed the world’s first microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors, that can compute upto 1.78 trillion instructions per second and is thought to be the fastest ever designed at a university. The energy-efficient “KiloCore” chip 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 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 3000 processors, researchers said. Most were created for research purposes. Since each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to further save energy when not needed. The chip is the most energy-efficient “many-core” processor ever reported.