Think you're pretty cool there with your hexacore desktop processor? That's nothing. Researchers from the University of Glasgow have created a CPU that has 1,000 cores – that's right, one thousand cores on a single chip.
The scientists are using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip with 1,000 mini-circuits inside. The chip has some considerable bandwidth too, as it was able to process 5GB of data per second in testing. Each core has its own dedicated memory.
Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede, the lead on the project, said, "FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker - so they are also a greener option."
"This is very early proof-of-concept work where we're trying to demonstrate a convenient way to program FPGAs so that their potential to provide very fast processing power could be used much more widely in future computing and electronics," he added.
While it won't do anything to upset the current state of desktop computing, it's interesting research into the massively multicore future.
Read more at the DailyMail.
