Meet the world’s first ever 1,000-processor microchip

The world’s first ever 1,000 processor microchip has been created — by graduate students.

The chip — called the KiloCore — can compute an incredible 1.78 trillion instructions each second.

It was created by a team at the University of California, Davis, and is believed to be the quickest chip ever created by a university.

The previous record for number of processors was around 300.

Professor of electrical and computer engineering Bevan Baas said: “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.”

Every single processor in the chip runs independently, and so can be powered off whenever needed — meaning the KiloCore is super efficient.

The KiloCore chip, which has 1,000 separate processors all running independently
The KiloCore chip, which has 1,000 separate processors all running independently

It was made using 32nm CMOS technology from IBM and contains 621 million different transistors.

It has already been demonstrated for things like processing video and encrypting data — basically things that require lots of data processing to be done in parallel.