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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.

7 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. In other news by ebonum · · Score: 5, Funny

    A young intern who likes to "work late" in Davis California has recently come into the possession of a rather large stash of bitcoins.

  3. remaining core count by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    the world's first microchip with 1,000 independent programmable processors ... Imagine how many mind-boggling things will become possible if this much processing power ultimately finds its way into new consumer technologies.

    Yeah, but you have to keep in mind how many cores will be left for the user!

    1000 cores minus:
    * 200 cores for anti-virus software
    * 25 cores for the ransomware battling it out with the anti-virus
    * 55 cores for Microsoft's Win10 update nagware
    * 350 cores for the NSA monitoring
    * 122 cores for the FBI monitoring
    * 75 cores to handle syncing all your data to the cloud
    * 94 cores to run the 3D GUI based desktop
    * 62 cores for constant advertising
    * 14 cores for Google to keep tabs on what you're doing
    * 1 core dedicated to emacs

    So, only 2 cores left for the user. No better than an Athlon from 2005, I'm afraid.

  4. Re:Can this chip run GNU/systemd/Linux? by ancientt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's probably all it can run. Typically specially designed systems need the ability to configure the OS radically differently than has been done previously which requires source code. Microsoft provides source code, as does IBM, in some special situations, but mostly it tends to be Linux that is used first. Consider the reasoning behind the OS chosen for the fastest computers in the world.

    Systemd? Probably because serious computer engineers don't have any trouble dealing with the irritation that systemd causes. (The rest of us may, but if you have enough smarts to handle building a specialized chip, then systemd isn't really a challenge.)

    --
    B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
  5. Re: Mind bogglingly complecated co-processing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I take it you've never done high performance computing, have you? More cores is often a good thing. If I'm doing a simulation across 1,024 cores and each node has 16 cores, that means I need a minimum of 64 nodes. There's a lot of communication that takes place over protocols like Infiniband in order to make MPI work. It also rules out the possibility of shared memory systems like OpenMP when jobs reach that scale and have to be spread across multiple nodes. If more cores are located within a single node, it reduces the amount of communication with other nodes and the resulting latency. It also makes shared memory a viable option for larger parallel jobs. If I can fit 64 or 256 cores on a node, there's a lot less need for relatively slow protocols like Infiniband to pass messages. I don't think the ordinary user has a need for 1,000 cores or would have such a need for a long time. But it really could help with high performance computing.

  6. 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});
  7. 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.