Multi-core and Many-core Processor Architectures

Abstract

No book on programming would be complete without an overview of the hardware on which the software will execute. In this chapter we outline the main design principles and solutions applied when designing these chips, as well as the challenges facing the hardware industry, together with an outlook of promising technologies not yet in common practice. This chapter’s main goal is to introduce the reader to the most important processor architecture concepts (core organization, interconnects, memory architectures, support for parallel programming etc) relevant in the context of multi-core processors as well the most common processor architectures available today. We also analyze the challenges faced by processor designs as the number of cores will continue scaling and the emerging technologies—such as transactional memory, support for speculative threading, novel interconnects, 3D stacking of memory etc—that will allow continued scaling of processors in terms of available computational power.