Multi-core Processors and Caching- A Survey

Multi-core processors are the industries ’ cur-rent venture into new architectures. This paper explores what brought about this change from a single processor architecture to having multiple processors on a single die and some of the hur-dles involved, and the technologies behind it. This is different from past architectures that used mul-tiple, physically separate processors, using multi-ple sockets. Having each processor, or core, on a single die allows much greater communication speeds between the processors, among other ben-efits. The biggest pushes for multi-core proces-sors have been the need for multi-threading and multitasking, security and virtualization [1], and physical restraints such as heat generation and die size. These benefits do not come free. Processor cache, the memory between the main memory and the CPU registers, is the performance bottleneck in most current architectures, and as such, can have vast improvements to the overall system. These caching methods are complex- multi-core processor caches are even more so. This paper will explore some of the research performed on different caching schemes.