BIOS: Technology Means Business

IBM and Rapport have previewed a breakthrough energy-efficient processor design, the Kilocore1025, which will feature 1024 eight-bit processing elements together with a PowerPC core on a single, low-cost chip.

Rapport and IBM 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.

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

Rapport’s current offering, the KC256, features 256 processing elements, provides more than 25GB operations/second at well under a single watt of power, and is available with tools and a development platform.

Kilocore-based processors address the shortcomings of conventional chips by putting hundreds or thousands of parallel processing elements together on small chips. These chips feature the most advanced, dynamic architecture available today in working silicon and can be dynamically reconfigured for compute-intensive applications, including mobile gaming, homeland security, server components, image processing, consumer electronics and suitcase supercomputing.

For example, with the Kilocore1025, a user will be able to view streaming live- and high-definition video on a low-power, mobile device at five to 10 times the speed of existing processors.

The IBM and Rapport collaboration is expected to bring disruptive solutions to the low-power computing marketplace. Rapport, an emerging Silicon Valley-based startup, will be contributing innovative software solutions as well as its unique Kilocore technology, and IBM will be providing world-class engineering services, foundry and ASIC technologies.

‘IBM’s openness and flexibility in working with Rapport and recognising the unrivalled value of our Kilocore technology has been tremendous,’ said Frank Sinton, Rapport’s President. ‘We couldn’t have built this relationship without Power.org. Combining the outstanding Power Architecture with Kilocore will open up Power’s extensive application base and developer community to the world of handheld, mobile and in-the-field computing.’

IBM has also announced new low-power extensions to its PowerPC 970MP offering. These newest offerings complement IBM’s low-power 970FX offering and target clients whose applications demand higher performance but are limited by power constraints.

Featuring sub 25-Watt typical power for dual 64-bit processors with dual single instruction multiple data (SIMD) units, the offerings remove the power barrier for a broad set of compute-intensive applications, such as medical imaging. IBM also announced power management features for the CPC945 bridge chip.

Supporting single, dual and quad processor applications, the CPC945 now offers power management options enabling total power as low as 12-Watts. These power efficient offerings provide clients with great flexibility in their system designs by reducing the trade-off of performance versus power across a broader set of applications.

[Best Processor Pricing UK]
[Best Processor Pricing US]

Got this product? Got a camcorder/mic? Let us post YOUR video/podcast review!