Today’s technology is all about the smallest, the fastest, the most energy dense and efficient hardware. Companies are literally racing to make impressions, aiming to beat their competition not just by a few points here and there, but by landslides. Take Intel’s 10-core desktop processor for example. Dubbed the i7 6950X, this innovative chip came out in May, and is aimed at gamers, video editors, general PC enthusiasts, and most importantly, virtual reality gaming. The chip runs at 3GHz with overclocking ability, and costs quite a bit of dough ($1,723). While on the topic of multi-core processing, consider this. A team of researchers from the University of California at Davis have created something that could easily be considered a landslide from Intel’s 10-core. Dubbed ‘KiloCore’, with Kilo meaning a thousand, this has got to be a big deal. It’s the first 1,000-core processor in the world. I told you competition is serious these days.

The chip, developed with 621 million transistors, maxes out at 1.78 trillion instructions per second, and is different than traditional multi-core processors in quite a few ways. First of all, each of KiloCore’s cores are clocked independently, ultimately saving as much energy as possible by each one shutting itself down when not in use. Another unique feature- KiloCore can execute 115 billion instructions per second, all while using a mere 0.7 watts of power. That, my friends, is onward of one hundred times more efficient than the CPUs you would find in today’s most popular laptops. Put it all together, and you’ve got one of the most power efficient multi-core chips to ever exist. The UC Davis team claims its the productivity rating on this device is so abundant, it could be run by a single AA battery.

The product has been lab-grown by IBM, using its old 32nm manufacturing process. Unlike Intel, whose 10-core chip is up and running, KiloCore isn’t a tangible product just yet. It’s currently being used for research, while IBM has hopes of establishing the 7nm processes. Even in the future, you couldn’t expect to see KiloCore in your home. With Intel’s 10-core chip, folks have been putting the processor to use to make virtual reality gaming more mainstream. But when it comes to the brand new concept of 1,000 cores, IBM is anticipating its use to be primarily for professionals who encrypt, process and manipulate video, perform wireless coding and decoding, and even scientific data. It could mean a lot for the future of mobile devices, but for now, all we can do is marvel at its multi-core, power-efficiency greatness.