You’ve heard about quad-core (4 cores), octa-core (8 cores) and more recently, deca-core (10 cores) processors for phones. However, all that pales in comparison to the KiloCore processor, which contains within it a mind-boggling 1000 cores.
Scientists from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in University of California, Davis, designed the energy-efficient microchip in a university lab. Built with 621 million transistors, KiloCore has a maximum computation rate of a whopping 1.78 trillion instructions per second.
You and I are unlikely to see the KiloCore in action; the processor will predominantly be used to process scientific data and provide high-level encryption, among other things.
Each core is supposed to operate at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GHz and will transfer data directly to each other, rather than use a pooled memory area that is a potential bottleneck for data.
KiloCore was presented at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu recently.
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