The appearance of the chip

University of Glasgow and Massachusetts scientists have created a 1,000-core processor, which increases processing speeds by more than 20 times and low energy consumption.

FPGA chip technology helps increase processing speed by 20 times.

Currently, a computer with at least 2 processors is normal and higher-end systems will have 16 processing cores. But Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede at Glasgow University and colleagues at Lowell University of Massachusetts have made a breakthrough in technology and successfully developed a 1,000-core processor on a single chip.

This success is due to the use of programmable chips - FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) - contains transistors like all other microchips but unique in that instead of "hardening" the Function in assembly line, basic circuits will be left blank and can be customized according to user requirements. Professor Vanderbauwhede can split transistors into small groups and divide each group into performing different tasks. This way creates 1,000 small circuits on a chip, a 1,000-core processor, each capable of following the initial instructions.

Professor Vanderbauwhede said, FPGA is not used in standard computers, because it is difficult to program but the power of this processor is very low energy consumption - an additional green technology option.

In this chip test about the ability to handle MPEG video transmission algorithms from the center, such as on YouTube, the speed achieved is 5GB / s, 20 times faster than the speed of modern processors. most current.

Multicore computers now still have to share on the same memory resources, which reduces processing speed. Professor and his team have overcome this problem by creating a separate memory for each core. Currently, the professor is planning to present at the international symposium on reconfigured computer (International Symposium on Applied Reconfiguable Computing) in March 2011.