The race for ever-higher clock speeds is dead and buried. The hardware industry has placed all its bets on parallelism and the increase in core counts to boost performance, but that hasn't stopped other developments that, despite being years away from the lab, show enormous potential. One such development is the KiloCore from the University of California, Davis, a chip with a thousand independently programmable processors and a power consumption of just 0.7 watts.
The Leap from 10 to 1,000 Cores
Some readers might think, "Lisandro forgot to drink his coffee," since I'm talking about thousand-core processors as if they were new. The first time we came across such a concept was in 2010, and since then, consumer chips have only increased the number of internal cores. The difference is that for the vast majority of practical cases (i.e., on our desktops or laptops), those ten, hundred, or thousand cores behave like a single processor.
Independently Programmable Processors
If we look at graphics cards, the number of cores is even larger, but they also have specific tasks in mind (the so-called Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data). The KiloCore chip from UC Davis, which has been making rounds in the media for the past few hours, breaks with that. In essence, KiloCore proposes that each of its processors can be programmed independently. Its manufacturing process, carried out by IBM, is nothing surprising with its 32 nanometers (similar to Intel's Westmere and Sandy Bridge architectures), but it still packs a respectable 621 million transistors, achieving a global performance of 1.78 trillion (in the Spanish "billions" sense) instructions per second.
Efficiency and Power Management
The best part is that this independence between processors also extends to their frequency and power consumption controls. Each processor runs at a maximum frequency of 1.78 GHz, and data is transferred between them directly, but they can be turned off as they go unused, boosting efficiency levels. As an example, these thousand processors can execute 115 billion operations per second while dissipating just 0.7 watts. In other words, a single AA battery would be enough to power the chip. We might not see it on our desktops and mobiles as a complete solution, but the KiloCore is practically begging to take on the role of a coprocessor.
