Multithreading is very easily explained, it is a question of taking advantage of the lack of execution of the processor to do something else. It’s the equivalent of free time that we take to do small tasks throughout the day and that they do not accumulate one after the other. Thus, when there is a memory latency problem, the processor can leave the task it is doing and take care of another one in dead time. However, its use implies a significant increase in the energy consumption of the processors. The way to get it? Duplicate certain parts of the Front-End of the processor, which amounts to increasing the number of transistors spent.
Multithreading in computer processors will disappear
One of the weirdest things about current Intel chips is the use of P-Cores or performance cores with multithreading support and E-Cores without. Whenever a tamaño, los primeros ocupan mucha más área que los segundos, pero la inclusión del HyperThreading está más bien pensado de cara a las gamas bajas, dado que los núcleos de “eficiencia” se crearon precisely para aprovechar esos tiempos muertos para tareas de second plan.
To better understand, chips have become more complex, and in the specific case of processors, parts used for multithreading have been replaced with full kernels, although simpler. In reality, it’s still the same strategy of big and small cores that has been around for a long time in mobile. And since we are. Have you noticed that no mobile processor uses multithreading?
On the other hand, the increasing cost when manufacturing the chips and the increasing need for additional cores to solve certain problems will cause the number of simpler cores to increase over time within the processor. We have already seen it with the Intel Core 13, where the rise was made on the side of the E-Cores. As for AMD, we have clues in various corporate patents that give us clues that when faced with Zen 5, they will follow the same path as Intel.
It won’t be a difficult change to implement
One of the challenges when building a multi-core system is the communication between them. Nowadays a ring-like typology is used where each multi-threaded core ends up having a duplicate communication system. Thus, adding more disks will not increase the internal complexity of the processor.
Although not in the field of applications
The fact that multithreading will disappear in processors to be replaced by simpler cores to do the same job does not mean that the concept will disappear in the realm of applications. However, and although it is a little harder to understand, using smaller cores and not Hyperthreading or SMT gives a performance boost by making process execution asynchronous.
If you don’t understand, it’s easy, in a multithreaded kernel the secondary tasks must wait for the main ones to finish and take advantage of the resources they leave free. On the other hand, in a system that combines large and small nuclei, they can take one that is free so that the process can be solved. All this without having to increase the consumption of the processor and thus gain in energy efficiency.
