A new, extremely energy-efficient processor chip that provides breakthrough speeds for a variety of computing tasks has been designed by a group at UC Davis. The chip, dubbed AsAP, is ultra-small, fully reprogrammable and highly configurable, so it can be widely adapted to a number of applications.

The worldwide attempt to increase the speed of supercomputers merely by increasing the number of processor cores on individual chips unexpectedly worsens performance for many complex applications, Sandia simulations have found.

Advanced Micro Devices will unveil its new quad-core Phenom desktop processors this year.