One or more dedicated processor cores can be reserved for signal and protocol processing.
"I think that what is actually driving this is that chip architects are becoming frustrated because they keep designing more sophisticated processor cores and aren't getting as much performance out of them," Halfhill says.
James Bruce of ARM, a British company that designs chips for the iPhone and other portable devices, reckons today's versions are 40 times more powerful than those around in 2000.One of the most important leaps has been the introduction of "multi-core" processors, tiny chips with two or more processors, or "cores", on them.
The "semi" means that the tags are partly battery powered to assist a more complex processor core that boosts functionality compared to passive RFID.
For all its energy efficiency though, SuperMAC is no slouch in the computing department: equipped with more than 150,000 processor cores in 9,400 compute nodes and more than 300 terabytes of RAM, it's the fastest supercomputer in Europe with a peak performance of three petaflops, or 10,000,000,000,000,000 Floating Point Operations per second.
We show numerically that the proposed algorithm and implementation are highly scalable in terms of the number of linear and nonlinear iterations and the total compute time on a supercomputer with more than 10,000 processor cores for several problems with hundreds of millions of unknowns.
It has four "big" processing cores for doing heavy lifting, with four more "little" lower-power processor cores for "lighter" jobs.
We also show that the newly developed algorithm scales well with more than one thousand processor cores for the problem with tens of millions of unknowns.
efmtool variably uses a few to all processor cores.
