Breaking the multicore bottleneck [News]

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 among 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-tocore communication speed and, in some cases, boosted it much further. Even better, as the number of cores was increased, the speedup became more pronounced.