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California Researchers Build The World's First 1,000-Processor Chip (ucdavis.edu)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the University of California, Davis about the world's first microchip with 1,000 independent programmable processors: The 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...more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor... The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.
Programs get split across many processors (each running independently as needed with an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 gigahertz), "and they transfer data directly to each other rather than using a pooled memory area that can become a bottleneck for data." Imagine how many mind-boggling things will become possible if this much processing power ultimately finds its way into new consumer technologies.

3 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Link to paper by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Informative

    The press release does not include it, nor does the slashdot summary. The link to the paper: http://vcl.ece.ucdavis.edu/pub...

  2. Re:Can this chip run GNU/systemd/Linux? by Pseudonym · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is basically a modern transputer. As with connection machines, GPUs, and all such machines, it will very likely need a traditional host CPU to manage it, and that may well run Linux.

    --
    sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
  3. 1000 exactly by evanh · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a 32 x 31 grid = 992, plus 8 extra stuck on one edge to make up the numbers.