News Summary

• Most died early when their coolant started to leak.Two ways to beat that limit on frequency are multiple cores and processing more data at once.Adding more processor cores has been an effective way to run more code at the same time..
• Compared to the gains achieved by relatively small increases in core frequency, or running on several cores, SIMD can have huge benefits.Among the major problems with the SIMD approach are that not all time-consuming code is suitable for this treatment, and some still has to be run conventionally..
• But there’s a practical limit as to how many of those cores will get used, which is where processing more data becomes important.Threads are normally relatively large chunks of code..
• Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) works at the other end of the scale, and with a little ingenuity can return greatest speed improvements with little additional power or heat load.The way this works is deceptively simple..
• That’s fine when you’ve only got to do that once, but what happens when you need to do it hundreds or thousands of times?With SIMD, registers are packed with more than one number at a time, and the multiply instruction works on them all at the same time..
• Many factors limit the maximum frequency that a processor can run at, including its physical dimensions, but among the most significant in practical terms are its power requirements and heat output, hence its need for cooling..