Multicore Processors: Why Parallelism Became the Key to Faster Computing
Posted by Prof. Kapil Gautam, Department of Information Technology 18 May 2023 As someone who has been teaching Information Technology for over twenty years in engineering colleges in Delhi, I’ve seen many trends come and go. But few shifts have been as fundamental as the move to multicore processors . That is why I have been spending extra time on this topic with my final-year students this semester. For decades, the speed of a computer was measured mainly by its clock frequency — higher megahertz or gigahertz meant faster performance. Then, around the mid-2000s, chip makers hit a wall. Increasing clock speeds further was making processors too hot and too power-hungry. The solution that changed everything was simple yet powerful: instead of one super-fast core, put multiple cores on the same chip and let them work together. A multicore processor is exactly what the name suggests — a single physical chip that contains two or more independent processing units (cores). By 2023, it is ...