Open Source “Piton” Processor Can Power A 200,000-Core Computer

A group of researchers from Princeton University created the open-source 25-core processor known as Piton. It could dramatically reduce the energy usage while boosting the processing speed.

Open Source “Piton” Processor Can Power A 200,000-Core Computer

As we all know data centers which store immense amounts of data and also support multiple cloud-based services uses computer chips that is not much different from the ones used on your computer.

A group of researchers from Princeton University created the open-source 25-core processor known as Piton. The developers of Piton wish to build a computer consisting of 200,000 cores or core powered by 8000 64 – bit Piton Chips. It could effectively reduce the energy usage while boosting the processing speed.

The Design is based on OpenSPARC, a transformed version of the processor OpenSPARC T1 Oracle. The researchers chose the architecture SPARC used by Oracle in its high – performance servers that are designed to operate with databases.

Piton chip has 25 cores each core operates at a speed of 1 GHz and are arranged in five lines. Each core has 64 GB of cache L2, with a total of 1.6 MB per chip. To communicate faster with other cores, there’s a mini router in other cores.

Each core also has a floating point unit that provides parallel computing on a large scale. The researchers at Princeton University stated that Piton is the largest processor in academia with more than 460 million transistors housed inside.

Princeton assistant professor said that “We’re very pleased with all that we’ve achieved with Piton in an academic setting, where there are far fewer resources than at large, commercial chipmakers. We’re also happy to give out our design to the world as open source, which has long been commonplace for software, but is almost never done for hardware.”