Multi-core processors-An overview (original) (raw)
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Multi-core processors represent an evolutionary change in conventional computing as well setting the new trend for high performance computing (HPC)-but parallelism is nothing new. Intel has a long history with the concept of parallelism and the development of hardware-enhanced threading capabilities. Intel has been delivering threading-capable products for more than a decade. The move toward chip-level multiprocessing architectures with a large number of cores continues to offer dramatically increased performance and power characteristics. Nonetheless, this move also presents significant challenges. This paper will describe how far the industry has progressed and evaluates some of the challenges we are facing with multi-core processors and some of the solutions that have been developed.
Multi-Core Processors: New Way to Achieve High System Performance
International Symposium on Parallel Computing in Electrical Engineering (PARELEC'06)
Multi-core processors represent an evolutionary change in conventional computing as well setting the new trend for high performance computing (HPC)but parallelism is nothing new. Intel has a long history with the concept of parallelism and the development of hardware-enhanced threading capabilities. Intel has been delivering threadingcapable products for more than a decade. The move toward chip-level multiprocessing architectures with a large number of cores continues to offer dramatically increased performance and power characteristics. Nonetheless, this move also presents significant challenges. This paper will describe how far the industry has progressed and evaluates some of the challenges we are facing with multi-core processors and some of the solutions that have been developed.
MULTICORE PROCESSOR TECHNOLOGY-ADVANTAGES AND CHALLENGES
Until recent times, we have worked with processors having a single computing/processing unit (CPU), also called a core. The clock frequency of the processor, which determines the speed of it, cannot be exceeded beyond a certain limit as with the increasing frequency, the power dissipation increases and therefore the amount of heating. So manufacturers came up with a new design of processors, called Multicore processors. A multicore processor has two or more independent computing/processing units (cores) on the same chip. Multiple cores have advantage that they run on lower frequency as compared to the single processing unit, which reduces the power dissipation or temperature. These multiple cores work together to increase the multitasking capability or performance of the system by operating on multiple instructions simultaneously in an efficient manner. This also means that with multithreaded applications, the amount of parallel computing or parallelism is increased. The applications or algorithms must be designed in such a way that their subroutines take full advantage of the multicore technology. Each core or computing unit has its own independent interface with the system bus.. But along with all these advantages, there are certain issues or challenges that must be addressed carefully when we add more cores. In this paper, we discuss about multicore processor technology. In addition to this, we also discuss various challenges faced such as power and temperature (thermal issue), interconnect issue etc. when more cores are added.
A review on microprocessor with multi-core
As we know that Microprocessors is a device which can perform the operation in microseconds. Each generation of processors grows a small type, but faster dissipated more heat and more consumed the power. A number of techniques such as data levels of parallelism, instruction levels of parallelism, thread level parallelism and simultaneous multi threading (SMT) already exists which make the big improvement in the performance of microprocessor cores. This paper present evolution of different types of microprocessor and multi-core processor followed by introducing the technologies and its advantages in modern world and also explain the currently challenges faced by multi-core processors and microprocessors.
Multi-core: Adding a New Dimension to Computing
Cornell University - arXiv, 2010
Invention of Transistors in 1948 started a new era in technology, called Solid State Electronics. Since then, sustaining development and advancement in electronics and fabrication techniques has caused the devices to shrink in size and become smaller, paving the quest for increasing density and clock speed. That quest has suddenly come to a halt due to fundamental bounds applied by physical laws. But, demand for more and more computational power is still prevalent in the computing world. As a result, the microprocessor industry has started exploring the technology along a different dimension. Speed of a single work unit (CPU) is no longer the concern, rather increasing the number of independent processor cores packed in a single package has become the new concern. Such processors are commonly known as multi-core processors. Scaling the performance by using multiple cores has gained so much attention from the academia and the industry, that not only desktops, but also laptops, PDAs, cell phones and even embedded devices today contain these processors. In this paper, we explore state of the art technologies for multi-core processors and existing software tools to support parallelism. We also discuss present and future trend of research in this field. From our survey, we conclude that next few decades are going to be marked by the success of this "Ubiquitous parallel processing".
Multi-Core Processors : Concepts and Implementations
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology, 2018
This research paper aims at comparing two multi-core processors machines, the Intel core i7-4960X processor (Ivy Bridge E) and the AMD Phenom II X6. It starts by introducing a single-core processor machine to motivate the need for multi-core processors. Then, it explains the multi-core processor machine and the issues that rises in implementing them. It also provides a real life example machines such as TILEPro64 and Epiphany-IV 64-core 28nm Microprocessor (E64G401). The methodology that was used in comparing the Intel core i7 and AMD phenom II processors starts by explaining how processors' performance are measured, then by listing the most important and relevant technical specification to the comparison. After that, running the comparison by using different metrics such as power, the use of Hyper-Threading technology, the operating frequency, the use of AES encryption and decryption, and the different characteristics of cache memory such as the size, classification, and its memory controller. Finally, reaching to a roughly decision about which one of them has a better over all performance.
Development of a simultaneously threaded multi-core processor
… Technologies for the …, 2005
Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) is becoming one of the major trends in the design of future generations of microarchitectures. Its key strength comes from its ability to exploit both threadlevel and instruction-level parallelism; it uses hardware resources efficiently. Nevertheless, SMT has its limitations: contention between threads may cause conflicts; lack of scalability, additional pipeline stages, and inefficient handling of long latency operations. Alternatively, Chip Multiprocessors (CMP) are highly scalable and easy to program. On the other hand, they are expensive and suffer from cache coherence and memory consistency problems. This paper proposes a microarchitecture that exploits parallelism at instruction, thread, and processor levels. It merges both concepts of SMT and CMP. Like CMP, multiple cores are used on a single chip. Hardware resources are replicated in each core except for the secondary-level cache which is shared amongst all cores. The processor applies the SMT technique within each core to make full use of available hardware resources. Moreover, the communication overhead is reduced due to the inter-independence between cores. Results show that the proposed microarchitecture outperforms both SMT and CMP. In addition, resources are more evenly distributed amongst running threads.
A survey of processors with explicit multithreading
ACM Computing Surveys, 2003
Hardware multithreading is becoming a generally applied technique in the next generation of microprocessors. Several multithreaded processors are announced by industry or already into production in the areas of high-performance microprocessors, media, and network processors.
Future of multiprocessors: Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessors
2012
Abstract As computer applications are becoming complex, large and versatile; the advent of Chip multiprocessor is ubiquitous. There are numerous researches going on about the core architectures within the chip. Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) is leading the innovation. Heterogeneous CMP is composed of cores of varying performance, and complexity. It gives better area to performance ratio, high throughput, and higher speed up and mitigates Amdahl's bottleneck to some extent.