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Concept
Multi-core processor
Summary
A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such as add, move data, and branch) but the single processor can run instructions on separate cores at the same time, increasing overall speed for programs that support multithreading or other parallel computing techniques. Manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single integrated circuit die (known as a chip multiprocessor or CMP) or onto multiple dies in a single chip package. The microprocessors currently used in almost all personal computers are multi-core.
A multi-core processor implements multiprocessing in a single physical package. Designers may couple cores in a multi-core device tightly or loosely. For example, cores may or may not share caches, and they may implement message passing or shared-memory inter-core communication methods. Common network topologies used to interconnect cores include bus, ring, two-dimensional mesh, and crossbar. Homogeneous multi-core systems include only identical cores; heterogeneous multi-core systems have cores that are not identical (e.g. big.LITTLE have heterogeneous cores that share the same instruction set, while AMD Accelerated Processing Units have cores that do not share the same instruction set). Just as with single-processor systems, cores in multi-core systems may implement architectures such as VLIW, superscalar, vector, or multithreading.
Multi-core processors are widely used across many application domains, including general-purpose, embedded, network, digital signal processing (DSP), and graphics (GPU). Core count goes up to even dozens, and for specialized chips over 10,000, and in supercomputers (i.e. clusters of chips) the count can go over 10 million (and in one case up to 20 million processing elements total in addition to host processors).
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