Future cellphones have thousands of cores

WHILE THE BOYS were fighting to explain each other why a 30-inch monitor is so awesome (wake-up call guys - it isn't. 24-inch and 27-inchers rock, 30 is just too big), a Game Power panel of experts here in Vegas featured a small company under the name Rapport.

This company launched Kilocore development platform quite some time ago, but seeing one thousand processing elements or "cores" working on a same die is just wow. Of course, these mini-cores aren't exactly comparable to current way of thinking by AMD or Intel, but only speak about the flexibility shown by PowerPC marchitecture. We're talking about extremely low power consumption part, incomparably lower than the CPUs of today.

Rapport is a company which employees and founders have big tie-ins with the Power.org and PowerPC marchitecture in general. After a while, the guys'n'gals launched the KC256 prototype chip. This chip features a general purpose PowerPC core and 256 additional processing elements. The elements aren't exactly 32- or 64-bit as we know them today - but rather 8-bit ones, which save die space by a mile and keep the power consumption at cellphone-friendly level.

We've pitched the idea to couple of our friends in mobile game development world and got nothing but murmurs of praise. It remains to be seen how this project will develop, but there is an alternative to current cellphone roadmaps from ATI, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm. µ