Some have probably not caught the time when talking about the computer processor and there was no question of some kind of cores. Then the clock frequency was especially appreciated, which was initially far from 1 Gigahertz. Then the frequency hit the ceiling and began to multiply the cores. Now the eight-core processor on the tablet does not surprise anyone.
In general, today they are already discussing a 1000-core processor, each core of which works independently. Read on …
Specialists from the University of California at Davis have created the KiloCore microcircuit, the configuration of which includes 1000 processor cores. According to the researchers, KiloCore is the world's first 1000-core processor. In addition, it is the most productive processor ever created at the university - its performance reaches 1.78 trillion instructions per second. The processor is manufactured by IBM using 32nm CMOS technology.
The processor, which consists of 621 million transistors, is interesting in that all its cores are independent, that is, they can execute different programs. In this, the new processor fundamentally differs from multi-core graphics processors following the Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data ideology, in which all cores work according to a single program, which limits their use to a specific range of tasks. The KiloCore cores communicate directly with each other, which eliminates the memory bottleneck in classic multiprocessor configurations.
Each KiloCore core is capable of executing a small program independently of the other cores. The main idea of the researchers was to break the application into many small pieces, each of which could be executed in parallel using separate cores. This will significantly increase productivity while reducing power consumption.
KiloCore cores can be turned off to reduce power consumption. However, the processor already demonstrates impressive energy efficiency. It can operate on a single AA cell, performing 115 billion operations per second and consuming just 0.7 watts.
Of course, the demand for a processor is determined by the availability of software. KiloCore already has applications for wireless encoding and decoding, video processing, encryption and other data-intensive tasks, including scientific applications and working with databases. The developers have created a compiler and other tools for programming the processor.
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It is not yet known whether the team of scientists plans to make their processor available to the general public or leave it in the scientific world.