Scientist at the University of Glasgow made a 1,000 core FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) processor which is 20 times faster than current desktop processors. The team of scientist which led by Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede, divided up the many millions of transistors into 1,000 different elements or mini-circuits, each of which are able to process their own instruction set. Currently no processors has more than 12 cores.
This prototype FPGA processor has apparently already shown 20x performance increase over conventional processors while using a fraction of the power.
In this development, the Scottish scientists have used a Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA). Specifically, Xilinx Virtex V4 was used in this design. By creating more than 1,000 mini-circuits within the FPGA chip, the researchers effectively turned the chip into a 1,000-core processor, each core working on its own instructions, writes Daily Mail. Also, the scientists claim that the 1000-core processor consumes far less power than modern processors.