Researchers work their way around multi-core software bottlenecks
Multi-core processors have become ubiquitous, but it took some time for the software industry to start taking advantage of their capabilities. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), this is partly because modern microprocessors require careful management of communication between cores. Researchers at Intel and North Carolina State University believe they have a solution: a Queue Management Device (QMD).
The QMD works by using hardware instead of software to take care of lock-protected software queues, which coordinate data access and usage between CPU cores. According to the IEEE, this strategy doubles core-to-core communication speed, making certain tasks much more efficient. For example, the researchers found that using a QMD for ...