"Engineers at North Carolina State University and at Intel have come up with a solution to one of the modern microprocessor?s most persistent problems: communication between the processor?s many cores. Their answer is a dedicated set of logic circuits they call the Queue Management Device, or QMD. In simulations, integrating the QMD with the processor?s on-chip network, at a minimum, doubled core-to-core communication speed, and in some cases, boosted it much farther. Even better, as the number of cores was increased, the speed-up became more pronounced."
"The solution?born of a discussion with Intel engineers and executed by Solihin's student, Yipeng Wang, at NC State and at Intel?was to turn the software queue into hardware. This effectively turned three multistep software queue operations into three simple instructions?add data to the queue, take data from the queue, and put data near where it?s going to be needed next. Compared with just using the software solution, the QMD sped up a sample task such as packet processing?like network nodes do on the Internet?by a greater and greater amount the more cores were involved. For 16 cores, QMD worked 20 times as fast as the software could." http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/processors/new-circuits-break-bottleneck-in-microprocessors Chuck Petras, PE** Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc Pullman, WA 99163 USA http://www.selinc.com SEL Synchrophasors - A New View of the Power System < http://synchrophasor.selinc.com> Making Electric Power Safer, More Reliable, and More Economical (R) ** Registered in Oregon.
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