The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is a microprocessor

Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

 designed by Intel

Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

. It is a research chip. Intel designed the chip to investigate the challenges and opportunities of integrating a cloud

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 into a chip.

Each SCC chip contains 48 P54C Pentium cores connected with a 4x6 2D-mesh. There are also four DDR3 memory controller

Memory controller

The memory controller is a digital circuit which manages the flow of data going to and from the main memory. It can be a separate chip or integrated into another chip, such as on the die of a microprocessor...

s on the chip, which are connected to the 2D-mesh as well. The cores are divided into 24 tiles. Each tile has 2 cores and a message passing

Message passing

Message passing in computer science is a form of communication used in parallel computing, object-oriented programming, and interprocess communication. In this model, processes or objects can send and receive messages to other processes...

buffer (MPB) shared by the two cores.