World's first 1,000-processor chip

Produced by university researchers, the KiloCore chip splits small programs among dedicated processors and can handle up to 1.78 trillion instructions per second, making it highly energy efficient.

Consumers are used to the idea of running multicore processors in their PCs, but modern versions typically top out at eight cores. Experiments building "many-core" processors have hitherto resulted in getting about 300 processors into a single chip. Now researchers at the University of California, Davis have broken the record, creating the world's first 1,000-processor chip. Researchers also say it is the most energy efficient.

The KiloCore chip is designed to run several processes at once while also being energy efficient. Each processor core can run a "small program independently of the others," according to the university. It does this by breaking up applications into several small pieces that run parallel to each other on the various processors. This is not the kind of chip someone is likely to find running in a consumer PC, but it could have bigger implications for the Internet of Things, smart homes and smart cities.

Having so many small programs split up among their own dedicated processors allows the KiloCore to be energy efficient while running at high clock speeds. The chip can process a maximum of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and has 621 million transistors, according to UC, Davis. The university says applications such as wireless coding/decoding, video processing and encryption have already been developed for the chip.

Chips like the KiloCore would be ideal for anything that requires processing a lot of data at once. This includes data centers, which will grow in importance with the Internet of Things. The amount of data in the world has been exploding in recent years, but it is considered small compared with what is to come. When millions of everyday items are connected to the internet and generating data, energy efficient processors capable of handling this kind of influx will be very important.