Advantages Compared To Single Threaded Processors
A single-tasking processor spends a lot of time idle, not doing anything useful whenever a cache miss or pipeline stall occurs. Advantages to employing barrel processors over single-tasking processors include:
- The ability to do useful work on the other threads while the stalled thread is waiting.
- Designing an n-way barrel processor with n-deep pipelines is much simpler than designing a single-tasking processor because a barrel processor never has a pipeline stall and doesn't need feed-forward circuits.
- For real-time applications, a barrel processor can guarantee that a "real-time" thread can execute with precise timing, no matter what happens to the other threads—even if some other thread locks up in an infinite loop or is continuously interrupted by hardware interrupts.
Read more about this topic: Barrel Processor
Famous quotes containing the words advantages, compared, single, threaded and/or processors:
“To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental and trifling advantages of Friendship, as that the Friend can assist in time of need by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel.... Even the utmost goodwill and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Heroism—that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“A single fiber does not make a thread, nor a single tree a forest.”
—Chinese proverb.
“It was a tangled and perplexing thicket, through which we stumbled and threaded our way, and when we had finished a mile of it, our starting-point seemed far away. We were glad that we had not got to walk to Bangor along the banks of this river, which would be a journey of more than a hundred miles. Think of the denseness of the forest, the fallen trees and rocks, the windings of the river, the streams emptying in, and the frequent swamps to be crossed. It made you shudder.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.”
—Albert Borgman, U.S. educator, author. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1992)