Just as you were getting used to the idea of multicore processors in systems on chips (SoCs), the world is changing again. As several presentations at August’s Hot Chips Conference make clear, ...

A CPU chip that contains two distinct processing units that work in parallel. IBM introduced dual core Power 4 CPUs in 2000, followed by Sun and HP in 2004 and x86-based Pentiums in 2005.

The block diagram of the overall multi-core architecture is shown in Figure 1 ... Blocking the process does not spin but simply blocks itself and releases the processor if it finds that it needs to ...