Anaphase is a research project at Intel that hopes to enable improved performance with single-threaded applications on multi-core processors. Intel mentioned a joint venture with Silicon Hive back in February that would improve multi-thread performance of single-core processors, more specifically with Intel Atom. It looks it is also working on doing the reversed, as more and more processors with multiple cores are launched.
Intel Anaphase comes from the fact that many applications are single-threaded by nature and can’t be distributed across multiple cores efficiently. With Anaphase Intel claims to have come a long way in automatically partitioning single-threaded loads across multiple cores.
Beside a whole lot of software optimizations it requires new hardware. Intel-Core Memory Coherency Module (ICMC) is a new components we will find in future Intel processors.
Intel’s combined software hardware technology will offer an overall performance boost of 10% in Spec2006 compared to multi-core solutions, while so-called “tiny-core” architectures will see an overall improvement of 41%. Intel is most likely referring to the Tera-scale project where it presented a working 48-core processor a while back. In some applications performance will increase 2.6 fold with tiny-core architecture.
Tera-scale processor with 48 tiny cores
The execution will be very important with Anaphase and when the new technology will be widely available, but considering the focus on multi-core architectures with both CPUs and GPUs this os truly a well suited development.
