MIT scientists develop 110-core super CPU

Chips

Both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 have an 8-core CPU on the inside, and that’s great. However, these CPUs are nothing compared to the 110-core processor developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The whole thing is experimental, so don’t expect to see it used in next supercomputer or in your next smartphone any time soon.

This 110-core beast of a CPU allows for faster operations and low power efficiency, according to PC World. Furthermore, the chip’s entire cache has been replaced with a shared memory pool that ultimately reduces the amount of traffic inside the chip, which improves the speed and task management.

Currently, top chip designers have refrained from adding more cores to publicly available CPUs, and as such, you’ll be very lucky to come across a chip with no more than 16 cores. We’re not certain why this is the case, as MIT designers made a 110-core chip that is only 10 millimeter in size using the 45 nanometers procedure. Further improvements could get it down to 28 nanometers, but with 110-cores on the chip, getting it so small would be a challenge.

PC World reports that MIT 110-core CPU is 25 percent faster “compared to to other processors” What other processors? We don’t know as MIT didn’t specify, but we are guessing they compared their 110-core CPU to 16-core chips that are widely available to the public. 25 percent faster than 16-core CPUs is not a whole lot, if you think about it. Then again, MIT scientists are not experts in chip design so if the likes of Intel or AMD take a serious look at this complex design, we suspect these companies could do a better job.

[via PC World, image via Wikimedia Commons]

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