Princeton develops 25-core chip for servers

The massive data centres that power today’s internet rely on banks of servers with microchips similar to those found in consumer electronics. But by building a chip to specifically address the issues that large servers face, the Princeton researchers believe they can significantly increase performance while at the same time reducing energy consumption.

Named Piton, after the metal spikes used to aid mountain climbing, the chip has a scalable architecture, allowing thousands of individual units to be stitched together into a single system containing millions of cores.

"With Piton, we really sat down and rethought computer architecture in order to build a chip specifically for data centres and the cloud," said David Wentzlaff, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton’s Department of Computer Science. "The chip we've made is among the largest chips ever built in academia and it shows how servers could run far more efficiently and cheaply."

While the chip design was a collaborative effort from Princeton, it was actually built by IBM, with funding for the project coming from DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The current version of Piton measures six by six millimetres and contains over 460 million transistors, each of which are as small as 32 nanometres.