Smartphones today have many cores which makes them faster than the previous generation, but scientists have developed a microchip with 1000 cores that can use only 0.7W.
The "KiloCore" processor microchip was developed by computer engineers and scientists from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis. It is considered to be the world's first 1000-processor microchip.
Most consumers today look at how many cores a computer or a smartphone has before buying. The main idea or notion is that the more the number of cores, the better or faster it will run.
While the idea is true to some extent, the new microchip was built more for efficiency. The KiloCore 1000 core processor microchip can shut down its individual cores which can still allow it to churn out 115 billion instructions per second with just 0.7W of power consumed, Engadget has learned.
To put the efficiency in perspective, the new chip could be made to run that massive number of calculations in just one AA battery. In addition, each individual core of the processor can run its own program.
Most multi-core processors today share the load of one program through parallel computing. Each bits and pieces of the data are processed together through the Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approach.
One caveat is that the KiloCore processor microchip is not slated for mass production soon considering that the scientists used the older 32nm manufacturing process, Science World Report reported. Most chips today are manufactured using smaller methods just like the NVIDIA's new GPU Pascal architecture with 16nm FinFET while the AMD Polaris GPU architecture uses 14nm FinFET.
Still, the feat from UC Davis scientists and engineers is impressive. Their 1000-core processor microchip has 621 million transistors and its full power can reach up to 1.78 trillion instructions per second.
China has also reached an impressive milestone by making their new 10M core supercomputer with up to 120 petaflops of theoretical computing power. They have easily displaced the United States and even their own top record holder from last year.
UC Davis's KiloCore 1000-core processor microchip is amazing even with an average of 1.7GHz per core. Its efficiency could be used as a basis for the next microchips on smartphones.