Multicore Processor

Multicore

• Physical limitations in terms of their clock

speeds and how effectively they could be
cooled and still maintain accuracy
• Original release was with two cores in a single
CPU but now there are options for four, six
and even eight
Contd… Multicore

• Intel's Hyper-Threading technology that

virtually doubles the cores that the operating
system sees.
• Example: You may be browsing the web or
typing up a report while an anti-virus program
runs in the background
 Threading

• Benefits and Drawbacks of multiple processor

cores is important to understand the concept of
threading
• A thread is simply a single stream of data from
a program through the processor on the PC
Contd… Threading

• With multitasking, a single core processor can

only handle a single thread at a time, so the
system rapidly switches between the threads to
process the data in a seemingly concurrent
manner.
Contd… Threading

• Benefit of having multiple cores is that the

system can handle more than one thread. Each
core can handle a separate stream of data.
• This greatly increases the performance of a
system that is running concurrent applications.
 Clock Speeds

• Clock speeds become more nebulous when

you are also dealing with multiple cores.
• For instance, a dual-core processor may have
base clock speeds of 3.5 GHz for each
processor while a quad-core processor may
only run at 3.0GHz.
Contd… Clock Speeds

• Dual-core processor will be able to about

fourteen percent faster than on the quad-core
 Symmetric Multi-core
• A symmetric multi-core processor is one that has multiple
cores on a single chip, and all of those cores are identical
• Example: Intel Core 2
The Intel Core 2 is an example of a symmetric multi-core processor.
The Core 2 can have either 2 cores on chip ("Core 2 Duo") or 4
cores on chip ("Core 2 Quad"). Each core in the Core 2 chip is
symmetrical, and can function independently of one another. It
requires a mixture of scheduling software and hardware to farm
tasks out to each core.
 Asymmetric Multi-core

• An asymmetric multi-core processor is one

that has multiple cores on a single chip, but
those cores might be different designs. For
instance, there could be 2 general purpose
cores and 2 vector cores on a single chip.
 Contd… Asymmetric Multi-core
• Example: Cell Processor
• IBM's Cell processor, used in the Sony PlayStation 3 video
game console is an asymmetrical multi-core processor. The
Cell has 9 processor cores on board, one general purpose
processor, and 8 data-processing cores.
• The one multipurpose core, known as the Power Processor
Element(PPE) controls the communication between the other
cores, and distributes computing tasks to the other cores for
processing.
• The other 8 cores are known as Synergistic Processor
Elements (SPE), and are specially designed to have high
floating-point throughput, especially with vector operations.
 GPU
• It is a processor optimized for 2D/3D graphics, video, visual
computing, and display.
• It is highly parallel, highly multithreaded multiprocessor
optimized for visual computing.
• It provide real-time visual interaction with computed objects
via graphics images, and video.
• It serves as both a programmable graphics processor and a
scalable parallel computing platform.
• Heterogeneous Systems: combine a GPU with a CPU
 GPU – Graphic Trends
• OpenGL – an open standard for 3D programming
• DirectX – a series of Microsoft multimedia programming
interfaces
• New GPU are being developed every 12 to 18 months
• New idea of visual computing: Combines graphics
processing and parallel computing
 GPU – Graphic Trends
• Heterogeneous System – CPU + GPU
• GPU evolves into scalable parallel processor
• vGPU renders graphics on a server
• GPU Computing: GPGPU and CUDA
• GPU unifies graphics and computing
 GPU Vs CPU
• GPUs contain much larger number of dedicated ALUs
then CPUs.
• GPUs also contain extensive support of Stream
Processing paradigm. It is related to SIMD ( Single
Instruction Multiple Data) processing.
• Each processing unit on GPU contains local memory that
improves data manipulation and reduces fetch time.