Glasgow 1,000-core FPGA accelerates MPEG video coding

Researchers at Glasgow university have developed a 1,000-core chip, which could lead to significantly faster processing compared to today's multi-core designs.

The design enabled researchers to show YouTube decoding at 5 Gbytes/second, 20 times faster than modern desktop processing.

Vim Vanderbauwhede, a researcher at Glasgow, working with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell have created a processor using a field programmable gate array (FPGA).

FPGAs are significantly faster compared to CPUs and can be configured into specific circuits by the user, rather than their function being set at a factory. This functionality enabled Vanderbauwhede to divide up the transistors in the chip into small groups to perform a different tasks.

The scientists said they were able to make their design run even faster by giving each core a certain amount of dedicated memory, unlike today's multi-core designs where the cores share processor memory.