English
Hot Chips: the puzzle of many cores
Ron Wilson, EETimes
8/24/2011 12:48 PM EDT
An easy conclusion from the annual Hot Chips conference this year is that multicore is becoming many-core. While the PC and server markets gradually evolve from four to six or eight massive x86 cores, Hot Chips papers suggest that the rest of the world is moving in a different direction: large numbers of relatively simple CPUs. But the trend is reinforcing a long-appreciated set of questions—as the number of cores grows, how do you deal scalably with interconnect, memory hierarchy, coherency, and intra-thread synchronization? Answers to these questions depend on the size of the design, the application space, and the heritage of the design team. Solutions at Hot Chips ranged from the elegantly—and perhaps overly—simple to the rococo.
At the large end of the spectrum was Cavium, describing the 32-core Octeon 68xx family of network processing ICs (figure 1.) The family claims its place in the many-core trend by using up to 32 identical MIPS64 cores. The individual cores are relatively simple dual-issue, in-order designs with some networking-specific extensions, according to Cavium fellow Richard Kessler.
|
E-mail This Article | 
|
|
Printer-Friendly Page |
Related Articles
New Articles
- Why RISC-V is a viable option for safety-critical applications
- Dimensioning in 3D space: Object Volumetric Measurement by Leveraging Depth Camera-based Reconstruction on NVIDIA Edge devices
- What is JESD204B? Quick summary of the standard
- Post-Quantum Cryptography - Securing Semiconductors in a Post-Quantum World
- Analysis and Summary on Clock Generator Circuits and PLL Design
Most Popular
- System Verilog Assertions Simplified
- Enhancing VLSI Design Efficiency: Tackling Congestion and Shorts with Practical Approaches and PnR Tool (ICC2)
- System Verilog Macro: A Powerful Feature for Design Verification Projects
- Method for Booting ARM Based Multi-Core SoCs
- An Outline of the Semiconductor Chip Design Flow