Scottish scientists have built a 1,000-core processor, claiming that this chip could make desktop computers 20 times faster. For example, currently the fastest pc runs an Intel® Core™ i7 Processor Extreme Edition which is about 6 core. However, Dr Wim Vanderbauwhede and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell have created a processor which effectively contains more than a thousand cores on a single chip.

"The core is the part of a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) which reads and executes instructions. Originally, computers were developed with only one core processor but, today, processors with two, four or even sixteen cores are commonplace.

To do this, the scientists used a chip called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) which like all microchips contains millions of transistors – the tiny on-off switches which are the foundation of any electronic circuit."

This is what Wikipidia says about FPGA: "A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by the customer or designer after manufacturing—hence "field-programmable". The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware description language (HDL), similar to that used for an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) (circuit diagrams were previously used to specify the configuration, as they were for ASICs, but this is increasingly rare).

The main difference between this approach is that FPGAs is user configurable rather than being set at the factory. therefore, one is able to group much smaller chip sections into a core. Therefore, by creating more than 1000 mini circuts within the chip they were able to tune it up to behave 20 times faster than the fastest pc today and process an algorithm which is central to the MPEG movie format at a speed of 5 Gigabytes per second.

The article also states:
"While most computers sold today now contain more than one processing core, which allows them to carry out different processes simultaneously, traditional multi-core processors must share access to one memory source, which slows the system down."

The researchers managed to give each individual processor a certain amount of dedicated memory.

Before we get too excited, I must say that the article states that this is early work in progresss.

"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.

“However, we are already seeing some microchips which combine traditional CPUs with FPGA chips being announced by developers, including Intel and ARM.

The team is hoping to present this research at the International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing in March next year.

Next Blog in the Moor's Law series will be the "Algorithm Innovation that could out-paces Moore's Law my a considerable margin"

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These are various short and long News Articles, Reviews and Blogs by Salar Golestanian and employees of SalarO.com as well as contributors of Scifiwood.com. The subject matter are mixed topics with Pure Science to Science Fiction as well as general topics on Web Trends, Technology, Software Engineering genre, or whatever subject that can affect the convergence of today's technology with Science Fiction in any shape or form. These Blogs and Reviews don't have commercial or corporate aspiration, so they are indeed completely independent views. Some of these entries may be short and just link you to the actual news or site that can expand further on the subject of interest. In Phase II we plan to incorporate some Social Networking applications within the portal.