A 1000 or kilo core processor now seems to be a reality. Researchers at the University of California-Davis (UC-Davis) designed it and raw computation power done in a study lab!
The team partnered with IBM to design and fabricate the KiloCore. The KiloCore has individual clocks for each core which runs independently of one another. It can also be shut down and doesn’t interfere other cores. This is similar done to save power consumption. The best is it can be powered by just AA battery!
“Based on the best of our knowledge, it is the world’s first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university,” said Bevan Baas, UC Davis Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in a press statement. Currently, his team maintains a database of multi-core chips and none that it found featured a die with more than 300 cores.
According to the list, the KiloCore—and most of the other chips on the list—had been developed in universities for research purposes and probably won’t find their way into commercial production any time soon. That’s partially because two of the most computing-intensive tasks today, Machine Learning and virtual reality, are increasingly being performed by GPUs, not CPUs.