Le 2015-04-01 13:30, Kim Enkovaara a ÃcritÂ:And the future looks like the switch fabric between the cores/chips is a major competition area. There are already chips under work with hunderds of cores which have cache coherent memory and very low latencies inside the chip, and also possibility to connect multiple chips together. And those cores usually have zero latency thread switching so the parallelism is exploding. Of course I'm looking this from networking side, but the designs also aim to other areas like datacenters.That's quite a "niche" market :-) It's exciting but we're not there... it's already a challenge to make a single CPU work :-D
I would say that single core is niche market today except on IoT side where u/nW power consumption is needed. Single core performance has reached its peak in many cases and power density and other problems on die force to multicore. Not that fun to SW side, but it is the reality. Many have already bitten the bullet.
So the current innovation is in the switch fabrick, memory hierarchies, thread switch latencies etc. The core instruction set is not that interesting. I would even say that ARM and x86 instruction sets will kill all others quite quickly, it is already visible (PPC is slowly dying, MIPS is not doing that well, FPGAs get ARM hard cores and their soft cores become less important etc.)."niche" CPU such as NPUs strive in their "niche" domain... I've heard there are several "tile" CPUs out there.
The modern NPU architectures are multicore ARM arrays with some accelerators and very fast internal communication networks. You are thinking the previous generation where they had a lot of special tricks. Datacenter vs. gNPU differences are actually quite small.
The bus structure for that is critical and that is not simple thing to solve. Many companies have poured a lot of money into this. Single core is not interecting anymore even for very low end.it depends to whom. The name of the project says "freedom" explicitly, to me it comes before performance.
The product has to be competitive.
as network processing is also quite hot topic ;)how many degrees today ? :-D
Intel (Axxia aquisition and rumors of Altera aquisition), Cavium, Broadcom, Ezchip (NPS/Tilera), Freescale (LS), Marvell and few others all competing with super high performance multicore SoCs... pretty hot ;)
--Kim