A NEW ERA OF COMPUTING - Over the past 40 years the mechanisms used to advance microprocessor performance and capabilities have evolved greatly, from executing a single instruction at a time on a single processor to executing many parallel instructions on many symmetric cores.Most recently a microprocessor capability might have been determined by its operating frequency and/or the number of CPU cores. With the continued integration of different processor cores, accelerators, and other processing elements, the traditional labeling has become less representative of a processor’s capability.Now with the introduction of single chip heterogeneous computing, a new measure of identification and comparison is required. To this end, the best general measure for the next generation of processors is to count all execution units that are capable of performing in the same compute capacity as the traditional central processing unit (CPU). In this paper, these will be referred to as “Compute Cores".
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<p>White Paper | COMPUTE CORES
WHITE PAPER: COMPUTE CORES
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
A NEW ERA OF COMPUTING 3
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HISTORY OF PROCESSORS 3
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THE COMPUTE CORE NOMENCLATURE 5
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AMD’S HETEROGENEOUS PLATFORM 5
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SUMMARY 6
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WHITE PAPER: COMPUTE CORES
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A NEW ERA OF COMPUTING
Over the past 40 years the mechanisms used to
advance microprocessor performance and capabilities
have evolved greatly, from executing a single
instruction at a time on a single processor to executing
many parallel instructions on many symmetric cores.
Most recently a microprocessor capability might have
been determined by its operating frequency and/or the
number of CPU cores. With the continued integration
of different processor cores, accelerators, and other
processing elements, the traditional labeling has
become less representative of a processor’s capability.
Now with the introduction of single chip heterogeneous
computing, a new measure of identification and
comparison is required. To this end, the best general
measure for the next generation of processors is to
count all execution units that are capable of performing
in the same compute capacity as the traditional central
processing unit (CPU). In this paper, these will be
referred to as “Compute Cores".
HISTORY OF PROCESSORS
The CPU Era
The first microprocessors began as stand-alone/
discrete CPUs, often executing less than a single
instruction per clock cycle. While CPUs might be
thought of in relation to PCs, the early versions were
used in less sophisticated applications like calculators
and other control applications. Advancements in
manufacturing technology quickly led to more general
purpose and programmable microprocessors. While
it was natural to add memory to the CPU, most other
functions, even other mathematical compute functions
like floating-point processing, remained as separate
devices to the CPU. Despite the limited functionality of
these first microprocessors, they represented the birth
of computing as we know it today.
The rapid progression of