Intel Anaphase – Single Thread Acceleration on Multiple Cores

Deep within Intel Labs Barcelona, a new software/hardware thread acceleration technique has been developed to boost performance of single thread applications on multi-core processors, the catch is we probably won’t see it for another couple years.

Anaphase is a hybrid system of software and hardware to increase the efficiency and processing of single thread applications on multi-core hardware. At the hardware level, a new unit called an “Inter-Core Memory Coherency Module” (ICMC) could find it’s way into your next processor, its job is to detect memory violations and has recovery mechanisms for the purpose of running partitioned applications generated at compile time.

At the moment, there are only simulated benchmark results, showing improvements of between 31-41% compared to a non-Anaphase system, so real world results will probably be much lower. Current processors do not have this ICMC unit, so we’re unlikely to see any improvement in current apps in the near future, but it would appear Intel is preparing the framework for it’s supercomputer on a chip (SCC) and Terascale projects. Sorry, no magic cure for a our Single thread – Multi-core Woes just yet.

Researchers from Intel Labs Barcelona now presented “Anaphase” which is a novel hardware/software hybrid approach to leverage multiple cores in order to improve single-thread performance on multi-core processors. This research focuses on different speculative techniques to automatically partition single thread applications to be processed on multiple cores.