The broader category of
multi-core processors, by contrast, are usually designed to efficiently run both parallel and serial code, and therefore place more emphasis on high single-thread performance (e.g. devoting more silicon to
out-of-order execution, deeper
pipelines, more
superscalar execution units, and larger, more general caches), and
shared memory. These techniques devote runtime resources toward figuring out implicit parallelism in a single thread. They are used in systems where they have evolved continuously (with backward compatibility) from single core processors. They usually have a 'few' cores (e.g. 2, 4, 8) and may be complemented by a manycore
accelerator (such as a
GPU) in a
heterogeneous system.
GPUs may be considered a form of manycore processor having multiple
shader processing units, and only being suitable for highly parallel code (high throughput, but extremely poor single thread performance).
SW52020, an improved 520-core[8][9] variant of SW26010, with 512-bit SIMD (also adding support for half-precision), used in a prototype, meant for an exascale system (and in the future 10 exascale system), and according to datacenterdynamics China is rumored to already have two separate exascale systems secretly[citation needed]
Eyeriss, a manycore processor designed for running convolutional neural nets for embedded vision applications[10]
A number of computers built from multicore processors have one million or more individual CPU cores. Examples include:
Gyoukou (
Japanese: 暁光
Hepburn: gyōkō, dawn light), a
supercomputer developed by ExaScaler and
PEZY Computing, with 20,480,000 processing elements total plus the 1,250 Intel Xeon D host processors.
SpiNNaker, a massively parallel (1 million CPU cores) manycore processor (ARM-based) built as part of the
Human Brain Project.
Specific computers with 5 million or more CPU cores
Quite a few
supercomputers have over 5 million CPU cores. When there are also coprocessors, e.g. GPUs used with, then those cores are not listed in the core-count, then quite a few more computers would hit those targets.
Sunway TaihuLight, a massively parallel (10 million CPU cores) Chinese
supercomputer, once one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, using a custom manycore architecture.[citation needed] As of November 2018, it was the world's third fastest supercomputer (as ranked by the
TOP500 list), obtaining its performance from 40,960
SW26010 manycore processors, each containing 256 cores.
^"cell architecture"."The Cell architecture is like nothing we have ever seen in commodity microprocessors, it is closer in design to multiprocessor vector supercomputers"
^Barker, J; Bowden, J (2013). "Manycore Parallelism through OpenMP". OpenMP in the Era of Low Power Devices and Accelerators. IWOMP. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8122. Springer.
doi:
10.1007/978-3-642-40698-0_4.