Note 2

The microprocessor is introduce in 1970s.
The growing market and the request for faster

performance to the industry to manufacture quicker and smarter chips.
One of the most classic and proven methods for increasing productivity is clocking the chip at a
higher frequency, which allows the processor to run programs much faster.
A multi-core processor is an integrated circuit to which two or more processors have been
attached for enhanced performance, reduced power consumption, and more efficient
simultaneous Processing of multiple tasks, it is a growing industry trend as single-core
processors rapidly reach the physical limits of possible complexity and speed.
One such method that significantly improves performance is multi core processors. Multi-core
processors have existed since the last decade, but recently they have become increasingly
important due to the technological limitations that single core processors face today, such as high
performance and long battery life with high energy efficiency.
Computer architects and system designers have to find effective strategic solutions for handling
these major technological challenges. Formulated as a question, we have to ask Are there ways
to increase performance by substantially more than 40% per generation, when novel
architectures or heterogeneous systems are applied that are extremely energy efficient and use
knowledge about the software structure of the application load to make productive use of the
dark silicon.
Studies have shown that the leakage current of a transistor increases as the size of the
microcircuit decreases more and more, which increases the dissipation of static power to large
values. One alternative way to increase productivity is to increase the frequency of work, which
allows faster program execution. Currently limited to 4 GHz, since any increase above this
frequency again increases the power dissipation.
First issue is the, Battery life and limitations on the cost of the system make the development
team think about increasing the power in such a situation. Power consumption has grown to such
high levels that traditional air cooled microprocessor server servers may require funds for liquid
or refrigeration equipment. The designers eventually achieved what is called a power wall,
limiting the amount of energy that a microprocessor can dissipate.
The second issue that rise in order to fully utilize the multi-core processor technology is
parallelism, programs should have the characteristic of being executed in a parallel order. There
are three types of parallelism: Instruction level parallelism, thread level parallelism, and data
level parallelism. In the case of Instruction level parallelism, the execution of the instructions
could be done in a parallel way as well as in a sequential way. In the case of thread level
parallelism, multiple threads of the same task are presented to the processor to be executed
simultaneously. In the case of data level parallelism, common data is being shared among
executing processes through memory coherence, which will improve performance by reducing
the time required to load and access memory.
According to Moor's law that was stated in 1965, the number of transistors on a chip will roughly
double each year, then he refined the period in 1975 to be two years. Moore's law is often quoted
as Dave House's revision that computer performance will double every 18 months. The problem
of adding more transistors on a chip in the amount of generated heat that exceeds the
advancements rate of the cooling techniques.[ CITATION Res \l 1033 ]
The semiconductor industry, which was once determined by performance, was the main goal of
design, and today it is guided by other important considerations, such as the cost of
manufacturing chips, fault tolerance, energy efficiency, and heat dissipation. This led to the
development of multi-core processors that efficiently solved these problems.
The fourth issue that rise in the development of multi-core processors is whether to use
homogeneous or heterogeneous cores. Homogeneous cores are all exactly the same, they run on
an equivalent frequencies, have the same cache sizes and functionalities.
Heterogeneous cores are different in their frequencies, memory models and functionalities. The
choice will be based on making a tradeoff between processor complexity and customization. The
production of homogeneous cores are easier since all cores contains the same hardware and use
the same instruction set.
While in the case of heterogeneous cores, each core could have a specific function and run its
own specialized instruction set.
A multi core processor is a single processor that contains several cores on a chip are functional
blocks consisting of computational blocks and caches. These multiple cores on a single chip
combine to reproduce the performance of one faster processor. Individual cores of a multi core
processor do not necessarily work as fast as the most productive single core processors, but they
improve overall performance by processing more tasks in parallel.
 There are many metrics which could be used in measuring processors performance such
as,
 throughput which is the average rate of how many processes were executed successfully;
 response time which is the time between the time between the request time and time that
the system starts working on this request;
 Execution time which is the time needed to finish the request, energy consumption, and
the memory bandwidth which is the rate of data sustained from the CPU core to the
RAM. [ CITATION Sch \l 1033 ]
Single core processors that work with several programs assign a time interval for working with
one program, and then assign other time intervals for the rest of the programs. If one of the
processes takes longer, then all other processes begin to lag. However, in the case of multi-core
processors, if you have several tasks that can be performed in parallel at the same time, each of
them will be executed by a separate core in parallel, thereby improving performance.
[ CITATION Sch \l 1033 ]
More than 12 years after IBM started into the age of multicore processors with the IBM Power4,
the first commercial dual core processor chip, software and system developers as well as end
users of business, engineering and embedded applications still take it for granted, that the
performance gains delivered by each new chip generation maintain a more than linear
improvement over the decade ahead.
Moore´s law appears still to be valid as demonstrated by Intel´s fast track from 32 to 22nm mass
production and towards its new 14nm CMOS process with even smaller and at the same time
more energy efficient structures every two years.
Very successfully and at the extreme end of the performance spectrum, Moore´s law is also
expressed by the industry´s multibillion transistor multicore and many core server chips and
GPUs. Obviously the transistor raw material needed for integrating even more processor cores
and larger caches onto future chips for all application areas and performance levels is still
available.

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The microprocessor is introduce in 1970s.

The growing market and the request for faster

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