Scientists develop chip with a thousand processors

American scientists, in collaboration with IBM, have built a chip consisting of a thousand processors. It is the first time that it has been possible to build a chip that consists of so many individually controllable processors.

According to the researchers at the University of California at Davis, the so-called KiloCore microchip can execute around 1.78 trillion instructions per second with its 621 million transistors. Each of the thousand processors can be controlled individually, in order to distribute tasks.

The microchip was built in collaboration with IBM, which baked the processors at 32 nanometers. The clock speed is a maximum of 1.87GHz. Despite the large number of processors, the scientists state that the chip uses energy efficiently. For example, a calculation that executes 115 billion instructions per second would consume only 0.7 watts. This would make the chip a hundred times more efficient than an average processor.

The American researchers want to provide more details in an upcoming scientific publication. A successor to the chip is also in the pipeline, with a different design. A commercial version is not yet planned.