Scottish scientists have built a 1,000-core processor, claiming it will run 20 times faster than today’s chips while using less power.
Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede led a research team at the University of Glasgow to create the futuristic processor using a programmable chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA).
Instead of the built-in circuitry of conventional desktop computer chips, these processors can be customized. So with some extremely clever programming, the research team was able to divide the processor into 1,000 cores, each capable of its own computation.
To give you some perspective, the fastest consumer processors such as Intel’s Core i7 top out at six cores. According to the Daily Mail, the 1,000-core processor processes 5 gigabytes data per second, and that’s “20 times faster than modern computers.”
