Scientists of the University of California have designed the world’s first microchip which consists of 1000 independent programmable processors in it. While other multiple processor chips have been created, none exceeds about 300 processors. This microchip is designed that can compute up to 1.78 trillion instructions per second. According to a report, it is thought to be the fastest ever designed at a University.

It is named as ‘KiloCore’ chip and it contains 621 million transistors. “To 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, a professor at the University of California, UC Davis, who led the team that designed the chip architecture.

Each processor core runs its own programme independently of the others. It is a fundamentally more flexible approach than the Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches. An application breaks into small pieces each of which can run on different processors, allowing high amount with lower energy use.

As each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to save energy when not needed, said Brent Bohnenstiehl, a graduate student at UC Davis. Cores operate at an average clock frequency of 1.78 Giga Hertz. The chip is the most energy-efficient ‘multiple-core’ processor ever reported, Baas said.

The 1,000 processors can execute 115 billion instructions per second while dissipating only 0.7 Watts, low enough to be powered by a single AA battery. The KiloCore chip executes instructions more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor. The team has completed a compiler and automatic programme mapping tools for using in programming the chip.