Betting on a 1000

When talking about compute power, the inevitable question is, how many cores can you implement to enable massive parallism to happen. In SOTA cell phones, it's either 4 or 8. In a Mac Pro or amped Linux/Win system, 12 but how about a 1000 powered by AAs?

Scientists have just unveiled the world's first 1,000-processor microchip, capable of working through 1.78 trillion instructions every second.

Each of those 1,000 processors can run independently, which makes the chip supremely suited to intensive tasks like encryption and weather forecasting – and thanks to some low-energy engineering, it can be powered by just one AA battery.

Because each processor can turn on and shut down independently of the others, it's about 100 times more efficient at executing instructions than the laptops of today, according to researchers who developed it at the University of California, Davis and IBM. It's called, logically enough, the KiloCore.

Today's top-end smartphones come with quad- or octa-core processors, so we're talking about more than a 100-fold increase in terms of the number of cores.

It gets better.

While today's laptop CPUs are based on a 14-nanometre scale, the 1,000-processor chip was developed using older 32-nanometre technology. Basically, the lower the number, the more transistors can be squeezed into the same place – which means there's still room for improvement with the KiloCore, even though it packs a whopping 621 million of these transistors right now.

To make the data throughput even greater, the chip's cores transfer data to each other directly, rather than using a shared pool of memory, which can create a bottleneck in other systems.

Beyond Real Time has arrived. :)

Click here to get the full skinny on this bad boy.