Introducing the explicitly many-processor approach

Abstract

Abstract The deeper reasons of the present stalling in computing is scrutinized, and to enhance the single-processor performance, a new approach explicitly considering the presence of several computing units is introduced, as opposed to the presently exclusively used, 70-years old single-processor approach. The appearance of many-core processors, having many processing units in close vicinity to each other, requires to re-think some principles of computing. The goal of the approach is to enhance the single-processor performance using cooperating cores, rather than to introduce a new method for parallelization. Technically, it introduces a new control layer above the cores, a new intermediate execution unit called quasi-thread, a modified compiling method and object code for transferring parallelization information from the development system to the processor, and an on-demand self-organizing processor architecture. The resulting processors have more effective and more “green” architecture, considerably increased single-thread performance, allow for more deterministic real-time behaviour, new scheduling principles for multitasking, less operating system overhead, etc. Surprisingly, the resulting computing stack is upward compatible with the presently existing one.