Feb. 1, 2011 Computer engineers at North Carolina State
University have developed hardware that allows programs to
operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at
which the "cores" on a computer chip communicate with each
other. The core, or central processing unit, is the brain of a
computer chip; most chips currently contain between four and
eight cores. In order to perform a task more quickly using
multiple cores on a single chip, those cores need to communicate
with each other. But there are no direct ways for cores to
communicate. Instead, one core sends data to memory and another
core retrieves it using software algorithms. "Our technology is
more efficient because it provides a single instruction to send
data to another core, which is six times faster than the best
state-of-the-art software we could find," says Dr. James Tuck,
an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at
NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. Tuck
explains that the technology, cal