Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, it exists. No, you can’t have one. Unless you happen to work in UC Davis’ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Even then, we’re pretty sure that they’re not going to let you take it out of the lab. We’re referring, of course, to the KiloCore, a processor that UC Davis researchers have come up with.
The name derives from the number of cores. If you remember your units of measurement, the KiloCore is an actual kilo-core processor. It features a whopping 1,000 cores, making it highly efficient at “…wireless coding/decoding, video processing, encryption, and others involving large amounts of parallel data such as scientific data applications and datacenter record processing.”
You would be efficient too if you were capable of a maximum of 1.78 trillion computations per second and were made up of 628 million transistors. The KiloCore, believed to be the first 1,000-core processor ever created, was fabricated by Intel. Each core is capable of a 1.78GHz clock speed. It’s not going to just burn through its motherboard, however.
Each processor is separately clocked and each core is able to run its own independent program, if that’s the sort of thing you’re after. Just don’t expect to see it in a smartphone any time soon. This is one technology that might take a while to reach the average consumer.
