April 5, 2006 – IBM Corp. and startup fabless company Rapport Inc. say they have developed a new energy-efficient processor design, featuring 1024 8bit processing elements and a PowerPCTM core, capable of processing multimedia up to 10x faster than comparable processors, while using a fraction of the power.

The “Kilocore 1025” technology could be used in a low-power mobile device such as a cell phone or a PDA to process streaming live and high-definition video at 5x-10x faster than existing processors, and “and orders of magnitude” lower energy, the companies stated.

Rapport will contribute software as well as its Kilocore technology, with IBM providingengineering services, foundry and ASIC technologies. The fabless startup currently offers a chip with 256 processing elements with more than 25GB operations/sec at <1W of power.

Meanwhile, IBM announced two new members to its Power.org community of developers building technologies around its Power architecture, increasing the roster to 44 members: Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC), which acquired IP and assets of IBM’s 400 series of embedded PowerPC products, and the U. of Tenessee/Knoxville’s Innovative Computing Laboratory.