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Multicore Mania

Faster, cooler-running consumer PCs are coming. The key: two, four, eight, or even a hundred CPUs on a single microprocessor.

When you can’t make a microprocessor run faster, what do you do? You combine two or more microprocessor cores, of course.

Intel and AMD, the top industry rivals, have already introduced dual-core chips for desktop PCs. And that’s just the start of a trend that could bring an important change to PCs: multicore processing. Both of these leading chipmakers hope to pack four cores into desktop PC chips by 2007. And Intel researchers are investigating how to put tens or even hundreds of cores onto a single chip.

Both chipmakers and PC makers need multicore chips for an important reason: they’ve run out of performance headroom on existing designs. (For years, chipmakers have added transistors and ratcheted up clock speeds to make processors run faster. But clock speeds can be increased only so much before a chip radiates too much heat inside the PC case.)

But why does the average PC user need two, four, or eight cores on a chip? For starters, think multitasking. “I call multitasking the silent ‘killer app’,” says Shane Rau, program manager for semiconductor research at market-research firm IDC. “Today, all the apps we’re using are nickel-and-diming the processor to death.”

By Laurianne McLaughlin

Full Story: http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16015,294,p1.html?trk=nl

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Making Multicore Fly

Before multiple-core processors can help PCs soar, the industry must solve some tricky software and hardware challenges.

By Laurianne McLaughlin

Throwing an extra engine in a car won’t make it run twice as efficiently. And engineers designing microprocessors with multiple cores (two or more central processing units), as well as the PCs that will take advantage of them, face a similar reality. Rather, for PCs to make use of multiple processor cores, the industry will need to modify hardware subsystems, and revise applications software.

One of the biggest hardware challenges with multicore processors will be picking the right memory technologies. Traffic on the chip’s system bus, which carries requests from software applications in and out of the processor, must also be optimized. "If you can’t keep the cores fed fast enough from memory, you haven’t gained anything," says AMD chief technology officer Phil Hester. "We’re trying to bridge as much of that gap as possible."

On the software side, multithreaded applications (which are written to recognize and use multiple cores) require more development time than usual. "It will take years before programmers have all the tools and training to make multithreaded code the norm — and not the hand-crafted exception," says Kevin Krewell, editor-in-chief of InStat’s Microprocessor Report.

Full Story: http://www.technologyreview.com//wtr_16060,1,p1.html?trk=nl

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