'KiloCore' - The Game-Changer for Microchips


BENGALURU: In today’s world, people are remembered and rewarded for bringing about a revolution in any field of study. As such, in a recent breakthrough a team of scientists at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has come up with the world’s first microchip having 1000 independent processors. The microchip named ‘KiloCore’ comes with a computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.

The chip is thought to be the fastest ever designed at a university. Bevan Baas, Professor at the University of California, Davis who led the team claims that it is the most energy-efficient ‘many core’ processor available till date. He states that the chip can execute 115 billion instructions per second while dissipating only 0.7 Watts, thereby enabling the processor to be powered by a single AA battery. Manufactured by IBM using their 32 nm CMOS technology, all the 1000 processors of ‘KiloCore’ can run its own small programs independently of the others. Being  much more flexible approach as compared to the ‘Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data’ approach, it allows the independently clocked processor to shut itself down when not in use. The first-of-a-kind microchip enables cores to operate at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GigaHertz (GHz) as well as transfer data directly to each other.

Some applications such as wireless coding/decoding, video processing, encryption apart from scientific data applications and data centre record processing are already being developed for the chip. ‘KiloCore’ which was presented at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits held in Honolulu executes instructions hundred times faster as compared to a modern laptop processor.

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