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Nickname: Daya
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| Daya has a Masters degree in Economics from Cambridge University, United Kingdom, a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics (minor in mathematics and statistics) from Bombay University, India, and another Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics also from Cambridge University. | ||
| Blog Archive: 2011 - Apr. 2010 - Feb. 2009 - Sep., Jun., Mar., Feb. |
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Posted: 10:27:30 AM, 09/05/2007
The challenge of multi-core |
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| The semiconductor industry has been driven for the past 30 years or more by Moore's Law. Ever faster processors have been delivered with shorter intervals between releases in the past decade. New processors and their derivatives enter the market only to be eclipsed very soon by the next release. For a time, it looked like the party would continue forever, until power and thermal issues raised their heads. A presentation from a leading semiconductor vendor a few years ago had an illustrative chart that showed the amount of heat generated by processors at each speed/technology node. From a candle flame it went all the way up to a rocket exhaust. Not a good thing if you happened to be using a laptop and ended up with third degree burns. As it was becoming clear that the relentless march towards faster processors might be seriously impeded by these issues, multi core was considered as a good work around for power and speed problems. In theory, adding more cores would increase the overall system performance while each core operated at slower speeds, thus at one stroke solving power and thermal problems. And so leading semiconductor vendors came out with dual core products and now quad core products, networking vendors came out with even larger numbers of cores and multi-core products began to enter the market in larger numbers. Unfortunately there is a lot more to multi-core than simply adding more cores to the same piece of silicon. Not all cores are equal. Multi-core systems can be implemented in different ways and the path chosen can greatly impact system performance based on the implementation scheme. Various architectural level decisions need to be made with regard to software, something that processor vendors may not have had to consider too deeply before as they could hand that problem off to the software community. The semiconductor industry is at a turning point today. Is it truly the end of the "free lunch" era? |
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