The majority of today's desktop CPUs feature either two or four cores squeezed into a single die. In the near future, eight-core products will become available. Hardware and software developers believe that in the next decade we should prepare for CPUs with hundreds of cores.Read more over here.
Designing software for CPUs with over 100 cores is radically different from designing software for a chip with only one. Wherever a part of a program can exist as a thread it can be given an entire core to itself. Huge gains in performance can be had from splitting large processing tasks into smaller pieces and using separate CPU cores to decode each small part, rather than the serial algorithms that most current software makes use of.
Ten technologies that can revolutionize PCs
Posted on Monday, September 22 2008 @ 0:15 CEST by Thomas De MaesschalckCustomPC gives their view on ten technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the PC industry. The first technology is the goal to create processors with hundreds of cores:
