Intel, the US-based company known for making some of the best and most controversial chips on the planet, has filed a new patent that aims to improve CPU performance using software rather than scaling up hardware. The technology, called “Software Defined Supercore” or SDC for short, works by combining the processing power of two or more CPU cores and making them work as if they were a more powerful single core.
This is done by dividing the single thread’s instructions into individual blocks, which are then executed in parallel. Also, each core runs a different part of a program, which helps maximise instructions per clock with barely any overhead.
The approach will not only increase the performance of the core but might also improve the performance per watt as it allows the CPU to switch between normal and performance modes depending on the workload. In its newest patent, the company says that this allows it to improve the single-threaded performance of a CPU without having to bump up the frequency and voltage.
Typically, CPUs come with large cores that usually run at higher frequencies to improve the single-core performance. While this approach has its benefits, it also increases power consumption and causes the CPU to heat up quickly under heavy workloads. Intel’s new approach might allow it to improve the single-core performance of a CPU while keeping the power consumption and thermals in check, but it does present some challenges.
Splitting tasks across multiple cores while expecting the program to run in order is quite difficult, but Intel says it was able to do so using various techniques like Shadow Store Buffer. But since the technology is still in its infancy, it still has to face numerous challenges like synchronisation complexity, low-latency intercore communication and more.
This does sound promising, but Intel has yet to specify how it will use this technology in its future products, so we will have to wait a while to see if SDC works as intended.
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