Multi-Core Processors: New Way to Achieve High System Performance

Multi-core processors represent an evolutionary change in conventional computing as well setting the new trend for high performance computing (HPC) - but parallelism is nothing new. Intel has a long history with the concept of parallelism and the development of hardware-enhanced threading capabilities. Intel has been delivering threadingcapable products for more than a decade. The move toward chip-level multiprocessing architectures with a large number of cores continues to offer dramatically increased performance and power characteristics. Nonetheless, this move also presents significant challenges. This paper will describe how far the industry has progressed and evaluates some of the challenges we are facing with multi-core processors and some of the solutions that have been developed.