Researchers boost multi-core chip power by 40 per cent

Scientists in US develop tools to beef up multi-core chip performance

Computer researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) have devised a technique to boost the operating efficiency of multi-core chips, paving the way for more powerful processors.

The researchers have improved the way the chips allocate bandwidth and caching, potentially enhancing overall performance by 40 per cent.

Chip performance depends on how efficiently the cores can retrieve data from memory, but as manufacturers have sought to increase the number of cores, the pathways can become congested.

One mechanism to get round this is known as prefetching - where data is stored in a cache on the chip. If the cache holds the data needed, chip performance increases, however if the data in the cache is inappropriate, chip performance suffers.

The NCSU researchers have concocted techniques to optimise the bandwidth allocated to appropriate cores and the means to determine whether prefetching will boost or curtail performance.

"The prefetching criteria would allow manufacturers to make multi-core chips that operate more efficiently, because each of the individual cores would automatically turn prefetching on or off as needed," said Yan Solin of NCSU.

The work will be presented at the International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems in California in June.