'Breakthrough' energy-efficient processor design

IBM and chip company Rapport have previewed a "breakthrough" energy efficient processor design, the Kilocore1025, which will feature 1,024 8-bit processing elements together with a PowerPC core on a single low-cost chip.

The two companies said they are collaborating to utilise Power Architecture technology to provide high performance processing with extremely low energy consumption.

The result is expected to be one of the most energy efficient processor designs of its kind, the companies said.

Based on Rapport's Kilocore technology and IBM's Power Architecture, the Kilocore1025 chip will process information at higher speeds and orders of magnitude lower power than existing processors.

Kilocore-based processors address the shortcomings of conventional chips by putting hundreds or thousands of parallel processing elements together on small chips, according to Rapport.

These chips can be dynamically reconfigured for compute-intensive applications, including mobile gaming, security, server components, image processing, consumer electronics and suitcase supercomputing.

The Kilocore1025 will allow the user to view streaming live and high-definition video on a low-power, mobile device at five to 10 times the speed of existing processors, Rapport believes.

Rapport, an emerging Silicon Valley start-up, will be contributing software as well as its Kilocore technology, and IBM will be providing engineering services, foundry and ASIC technologies.