Some applications lend themselves to a multicore world very well, but there are some that just need a single core that goes as fast as possible, and CPUs have hit a limitation on how fast they can go. Until now, there has simply been no solution to that problem beyond using the fastest processor you can get. But Intel has a project to make multiple cores act like a single core. How is this possible? Hardware Central takes a look.
When Intel ran into a performance wall with CPUs about a decade ago, it was the end of the single-core era of chips. As the thinking went, if chipmakers couldn’t get processors to 4GHz, 5GHz and beyond, then they would get performance by dividing up the work among multiple CPU cores.
That’s great for apps that lend themselves to multithreaded execution. But there are still some applications, such as massive calculations or data searches and sorts, where Step B requires the results of Step A, and in that case, a single 5GHz core will get you there faster than two 2.5GHz cores.