Article: “The Memory Wall is ending multicore scaling”

From this article  at Electronic Design: “Multicore processors dominate today’s computing landscape. Multicore chips are found in platforms as diverse as Apple’s iPad and the Fujitsu K supercomputer. In 2005, as power consumption limited single-core CPU clock rates to about 3 GHz, Intel introduced the two-core Core 2 Duo. Since then, multicore CPUs and graphics processing units (GPUs) have dominated computer architectures. Integrating more cores per socket has become the way that processors can continue to exploit Moore’s law.”

“But a funny thing happened on the way to the multicore forum: processor utilization began to decrease. At first glance, Intel Sandy Bridge servers, with eight 3-GHz cores, and the Nvidia Fermi GPU, featuring 512 floating-point engines, seem to offer linearly improved multicore goodness.”

“But a worrying trend has emerged in supercomputing, which deploys thousands of multicore CPU and GPU sockets for big data applications, foreshadowing severe problems with multicore. As a percentage of peak mega-floating-point operations per second (Mflops), today’s supercomputers are less than 10% utilized. The reason is simple: input-output (I/O) has not kept pace with multicore millions of instructions per second (MIPS).”

Interesting.