Term of the Moment
fuzzy computer
Definition: multicore
A computer chip that contains two or more CPU processing units that operate in parallel. Instead of continuing to squeeze more speed out of a single processor, it became obvious years ago that creating chips with multiple processing cores was more practical. All major operating systems were updated to support this "symmetric multiprocessing" (SMP) capability. The operating system scheduler distributes both OS, application and background tasks across available cores. Antivirus can occupy one or more cores, and multicore architecture is ideal for virtualized servers (see virtual machine).
3D Rendering and AI
Multicore processing is essential for applications requiring extensive computations on separate sets of data. For example, a GPU can have thousands of CUDA cores processing in parallel, each performing one calculation for graphics, or hundreds of Tensor cores, each handling a matrix multiplication for AI.
From Two to Dozens of Cores
Starting in 2005, dual-core and quad-core chips began to emerge for the x86 platform, and in subsequent years, multicore PC and Mac laptop and desktop computers became commonplace. In 2014, IBM's POWER8 CPU was introduced with up to 12 cores, and Intel introduced an 18-core Xeon chip. CPUs with more than a hundred cores, each handling two separate processing threads in parallel, are available today. See SMP, dual core, triple core, quad core, octa-core, multithreading, multiprocessing and Cell chip.
Eight-Core POWER Chip
Seventy-Two Cores
3D Rendering and AI
Multicore processing is essential for applications requiring extensive computations on separate sets of data. For example, a GPU can have thousands of CUDA cores processing in parallel, each performing one calculation for graphics, or hundreds of Tensor cores, each handling a matrix multiplication for AI.
From Two to Dozens of Cores
Starting in 2005, dual-core and quad-core chips began to emerge for the x86 platform, and in subsequent years, multicore PC and Mac laptop and desktop computers became commonplace. In 2014, IBM's POWER8 CPU was introduced with up to 12 cores, and Intel introduced an 18-core Xeon chip. CPUs with more than a hundred cores, each handling two separate processing threads in parallel, are available today. See SMP, dual core, triple core, quad core, octa-core, multithreading, multiprocessing and Cell chip.
In 2010, IBM debuted its POWER7 generation with up to eight cores. Providing four threads per core, a 32-chip POWER7 computer can process 1,024 simultaneous instruction streams. (Image courtesy of IBM.)
EZchip's Gx8072 system-on-chip (SoC) has 24 lanes of PCI Express and up to 100 Gbps of Ethernet I/O. (Image courtesy of EZchip Semiconductor Corporation.)