Standard Multi-Core Processors

Abstract

For a long time, the performance of general-purpose processors could be improved by increasing clock frequency and instruction level parallelism (ILP). Nowadays, only diminished gains in performance can be reached by higher processor clock rates. This results from the difficulty to find enough parallelism in the instruction stream of a single process to keep higher performance processor cores busy. Another cause is the increasing gap between processor and main memory speed because the latency and the bandwidth of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) does not improve accordingly to processor operating frequencies. Finally, higher clock rates of generalpurpose processors lead to dramatically increased problems in manufacturing, system design, and deployment. These three arguments, commonly referred to as the ILP wall, the memory wall and the power wall, respectively, have constituted much of the motivation for the advent of multi-core processors during the last few years.