California Researchers Build The World's First 1,000-Processor Chip (ucdavis.edu)

A report from the University of California, Davis about the world's first microchip with 1,000 independent programmable processors:

The 1,000 processors can execute 115 billion instructions per second while dissipating only 0.7 Watts, low enough to be powered by a single AA battery...more than 100 times more efficiently than a modern laptop processor... 

The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors. 
 
Programs get split across many processors (each running independently as needed with an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 gigahertz), "and they transfer data directly to each other rather than using a pooled memory area that can become a bottleneck for data."

 Imagine how many mind-boggling things will become possible if this much processing power ultimately finds its way into new consumer technologies.

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I recall in the early 90's hearing about a motherboard with two processors on board.

The guy who told me about it was using Renderman, a program that is used in animation creation.

Somehow he had gotten a copy of the program which is free to the public at one point, but was not way back then.

Today you can obtain a copy of the program on a sliding scale of your needs.

I can only imagine what a 1,000 processor chip could do in minutes what used to take days in Renderman.

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 China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. 

 This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors.

 There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight.

 Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops (Linpack is 93 petaflops), according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers.

 It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level.

 But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers. 

The U.S. initiated this ban because China, it claimed, was using its Tianhe-2 system for nuclear explosive testing activities. 

The U.S. stopped live nuclear testing in 1992 and now relies on computer simulations. 

Critics in China suspected the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts.

 There has been nothing secretive about China's intentions. 

Researchers and analysts have been warning all along that U.S. exascale (an exascale is 1,000 petaflops) development, supercomputing's next big milestone, was lagging.