By 2004, computer chip manufactures were realising that they were facing huddles in terms of increasing processor speeds. It is not that they could no longer push the processors to run faster, they could, but at a premium. The more the processors were whipped in line to work harder, the higher were the cooling requirements.
Because the laws of physics had conspired against the old ways of increasing processor power, engineers had to find some detour. Instead of increasing CPU speeds, the architects of computer technology shrewdly found a way to combine two chips into one.
All I am saying is that engineers started to unite processors in some holy matrimony. And we started to have computer chip families. These processors were called dual-core processors. Computer chip architects got excited with their discovery; they wanted more of the action and they went further and made the processors polygamous. They combined four chips into one and called that marriage of processors quad-core.
If you have a laptop with an Intel Core i7 processor, you have a quad core processor. If you would care to check the engine (computer chip) of your wonderful smart phone, the chances are that it is a dual-core.
Voracious appetite for computer processing power has left engineers wondering as to how far they can try their luck on this path. I forget to tell you that 8-core processors are plentiful on the market and have been around for some time now.
For the last ten years, some ambitious CPU developers have been toying with an idea of a cool one hundred computer chips combined into one. Wait a minute, that chip is not the one that you would expect inside the hood of your future laptop. This is for some monster computer that performs so much in fractions of seconds. We are talking about computer that interprets climate change and work with doctors to solve complicated diagnosis of diseases.
For one group, UC Davis the 100-core chip is no longer an interesting exploit. During 2016 Symposium of VLSI technology, UC Davis unveiled a paper where the group is describing a 1,000-core processor. The Kilo-Core beast is capable of handling 1.78 trillion instructions per second using 621 million transistors.
The prototype chip was manufactured by IBM and UC Davis designed all the software tools. At one thousand chips, my analogy of marriage would only work for the old biblical days of David and his son Solomon. What shall we call this? This has to be a network of computer processors. Instead of taking of a network of computers now we have a set of connections for processors.
The problem with such architecture is that it can take up space and cause a lot of power leakages. The Kilo-Core processors have been meticulously built; it does not take up space and only wastes 1.1 percent power. The downside is the individual processors in the Kilo-Core giant are less powerful than available single-core processors in your smart phone. However, what separates this muscular man from the boys is the collective power of the chips.
The problem with such huge projects is that they take a 5-10 year to materialize. That is a very long period in the computer technology world. UC Davis should only hope that Intel or AMD should not come up with a much smaller 32-Core processor that can outclass the Kilo-Core wonder boy.
Otherwise; UC Davis project seems very interesting for now.
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