- Feb 7, 2014
- 1,540
Intel and other multicore processor makers want cores to be able to communicate with each other faster. More cores (the Haswell-EX Xeon E7-8890 V3 shown here has 18) typically means much more time coordinating communications.
Engineers at North Carolina State University and at Intel have come up with a solution to one of the modern microprocessor’s most persistent problems: communication between the processor’s many cores. Their answer is a dedicated set of logic circuits they call the Queue Management Device, or QMD. In simulations, integrating the QMD with the processor’s on-chip network, at a minimum, doubled core-to-core communication speed, and in some cases, boosted it much farther. Even better, as the number of cores was increased, the speed-up became more pronounced.
In the last decade, microprocessor designers started putting multiple copies of processor cores on a single die as a way to continue the rate of performance improvement computer makers had enjoyed without chip-killing hot spots forming on the CPU. But that solution comes with complications. For one, it meant that software programs had to be written so that work was divided among processor cores. The result: Sometimes different cores would need to work on the same data or have to coordinate the passing of data from one core to another.
You can catch the rest of this news here: New System Could Break Bottleneck in Microprocessors
Engineers at North Carolina State University and at Intel have come up with a solution to one of the modern microprocessor’s most persistent problems: communication between the processor’s many cores. Their answer is a dedicated set of logic circuits they call the Queue Management Device, or QMD. In simulations, integrating the QMD with the processor’s on-chip network, at a minimum, doubled core-to-core communication speed, and in some cases, boosted it much farther. Even better, as the number of cores was increased, the speed-up became more pronounced.
In the last decade, microprocessor designers started putting multiple copies of processor cores on a single die as a way to continue the rate of performance improvement computer makers had enjoyed without chip-killing hot spots forming on the CPU. But that solution comes with complications. For one, it meant that software programs had to be written so that work was divided among processor cores. The result: Sometimes different cores would need to work on the same data or have to coordinate the passing of data from one core to another.
You can catch the rest of this news here: New System Could Break Bottleneck in Microprocessors
