Several notable advantages of multi-core processors

According to IDC's latest forecasts, almost all servers, PCs and http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/9600.html "> Notebook products will be fully multicore in 2009." As these hardware products become more and more ready for multi-core technology, the biggest challenge facing the entire IT industry today is how to extend the parallel programming that was used only for high-end application development to all software development processes to create more applications that support multithreaded parallelism-especially in key middleware Fully release the performance potential of multi-core processors.

The current middleware products, although most of them are based on multithreading or multiple processes, but because of the traditional single thread programming thinking and the development of language and tools constraints, so that software applications limit the performance of multi-core processors. In this respect, Microsoft's chief research officer Craig Mundie says the core challenge for the software industry is programming for multi-core processors. Using Java to write multithreaded applications has been a lot simpler than C + + programmers. However, it is still not easy for multithreaded routines to achieve high performance. When the CPU enters the multi-core era, the performance tuning of the software is no longer a simple matter. Programs that do not have parallelization may run slower on new hardware than before.

Multi-core refers to the integration of two or more complete compute engines (kernels) in one processor, a multi-core processor is a single chip (also known as a "silicon core") that can be plugged directly into a single processor slot, but the operating system uses all of the relevant resources to use each of its execution cores as a discrete logical processor. By dividing tasks between two execution cores, multi-core processors can perform more tasks within a specific clock cycle.

Multi-Core technology enables servers to process tasks in parallel, multi-core systems are easier to expand, and can incorporate more robust processing in a more delicate form, which uses less power and fewer calories to compute power. Multicore architecture enables current software to run better and create a more sophisticated architecture for future software authoring. While serious software vendors are still exploring new software concurrency patterns, existing software can support multi-core platforms without being modified as they migrate to multi-core processors.

The operating system is designed to fully utilize multiple processors and can be run without modification. To take full advantage of multi-core technology, application developers need to incorporate more ideas into programming, but the design process is the same as the current design process for Chenduo processing (SMP) systems, and existing single-threaded applications will continue to run. Thanks to the application of thread technology, it will show superior performance scalability when running on multi-core processors such software includes multimedia applications (content creation, editing, and local and data streaming playback), engineering and other technical computing applications, and intermediate and back-tier server applications such as application servers and databases.

multi-core processors have several notable advantages:

The control logic is simple: compared with superscalar microprocessor structure and long instruction word structure, the control logic complexity of single chip multiprocessor structure is much lower. The corresponding single chip multiprocessor hardware implementation is necessarily much simpler.

High frequency: Because the control logic of single chip multiprocessor structure is relatively simple, contains very few global signal, so the line delay has little effect on it, therefore, under the same process condition, the hardware realization of single chip multiprocessor should obtain higher working frequency than superscalar microprocessor and super long instruction word microprocessor.

Low communication latency: Due to multiple processors integrated on a chip, and the use of shared cache or memory, multithreading communication delay will be significantly reduced, which also put a higher demand for the storage system.

Low power consumption: through the dynamic regulation of voltage/frequency, load optimization distribution, can effectively reduce the CMP power consumption.

Short design and verification cycles: microprocessor vendors generally use the existing mature single core processor as the core of the processor, which can shorten the design and verification cycle, save research and development costs.