Information Systems

Information Systems Hardware ◾ 73

Multiple Cores, Multiple Threads

Moore’s Law tells us that the transistors in a central processor will continue to get smaller.

Some benets of smaller transistors were discussed earlier. One was the ability to do more

at a time by assigning dierent groups of transistors to dierent processing tasks.

For decades, this produced steady performance gains. In the twenty-rst century, the

benets of more transistors per chip reached the point of diminishing returns. A new

approach was needed.

is approach is to put multiple processing elements on a single chip. Each such element

is a complete processor, but t