The need to achieve higher performance without driving up power consumption and heat has become a critical concern for many IT organizations, given the density levels at which industry-standard servers are being deployed and the power and thermal constraints in today's data centers.
The Multi Core Processor architectures is designed to boost performance and minimize heat output by integrating two or more processor cores into a single processor socket. This Project introduces the multicore concept and discusses key factors that IT organizations should consider when determining how best to take advantage of Multi Core Processor technology.
A Multi Core Processor can be defined as a processor with more than one physical core on a single chip. Each core contains its own dedicated processing resources similar to an individual CPU, except for the processor side bus which may be shared between two cores. Basically it is two microprocessors on the same integrated circuit or chip.
Instead of pushing the chips to run faster, CPU designers are adding resources, such as more cores and more cache to provide comparable or better performance at lower power. Additional transistors are being leveraged to create more diverse capabilities ultimately bring more performance to embedded application program within a lower power budget. Dual-core CPUs, for example, can be clocked at slower speeds and supplied with lower voltage to yield greater performance.
Having two cores on a single chip has also rose issue for licensing of software. Some software venders charge license fees on per core basis and some on per socket or chip basis. This is the only area in which the multicore processor has to evolve.
| Multicore Architecutre | | | Hyper-Treading | | | Power & cooling advantages | | | Multicore Issue |
