Researchers use hardware to accelerate core-to-core chip communication read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/783-researchers-use-hardware-to-accelerate-core-to-core-chip-communication

A new way to significantly accelerate core-to-core chip communication has been developed by researchers from North Carolina university and intel corporation. Their advance relies on hardware to coordinate efforts between cores for multiprocessor operations.

Commonly, many computer functions require multiple processors, or cores, together work in a coordinated way. Currently, this coordination is achieved by sending and receiving software commands between cores. But this requires cores to read and execute the software, which takes time.

Now researchers have developed a chip design that replaces the software instructions with built-in hardware that coordinates communication between cores, accelerating the process.

Yan Solihin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State says, this process called the core-to-core communication acceleration framework (CAF), improves communication performance by 2 to 12 times.

The key to the CAF design is a queue management device (QMD), which is a small device attached to the processor network on a chip. The QMD is capable of simple computational functions and effectively keeps track of communication requests between cores without having to rely on software routines.

QMD can perform basic computation, the QMD can be used to aggregate data from multiple cores accelerating some basic computational functions by as much as 15 percent.