The University of California presented KiloCore, the amazing chip that has a thousand programmable cores, which according to the institution aims to bring parallel processing to a level never before achieved.
The partnership with IBM enabled 32 nanometer fabrication technology to be used on the chip. KiloCore has 621 million transistors and can perform 1,78 trillion operations per second. Each core is conditioned to a frequency of up to 1,78 GHz. This limit could be even higher, but the idea of the project is to offer high processing capacity with the lowest power consumption.
Each core of the chip can work independently. Thus, cores that are not being used can shut down to save even more energy, according to Brent Bohnenstiehl, one of the project's participants. This mode of operation also allows each core to perform a different set of operations. With this, an application can be divided into many small parts, each of which is in charge of a core. It is as if there are numerous independent processors working at the same time.
It is not clear when and if the project will in fact move to a commercial format, but the team in charge already has a set of tools so the chip can be used in applications involving large data processing. This is a sign that there are plans to have the technology out of the laboratory at some point.
