Intel Family Processors: The paper was the work of four Intel Corporation technologists—including Pat Gelsinger, vice president and general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, who envisioned the future through the lens of Moore’s Law. Fifteen years later, their predictions are proving true, and multi-core processor capability development has become one of Intel's top business and product initiatives.

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by Intel Corporation

In the October 1989 issue of IEEE Spectrum, an article titled "Microprocessors Circa 2000" predicted that multi-core processors could come to market soon after the turn of the century. The paper was the work of four Intel Corporation technologists—including Pat Gelsinger, vice president and general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, who envisioned the future through the lens of Moore’s Law. Fifteen years later, their predictions are proving true, and multi-core processor capability development has become one of Intel's top business and product initiatives.

Intel continues to focus its near- and long-term efforts on enhancing the overall computing platform to deliver greater value and functionality to PC users. About three years ago Intel sharpened its continued focus on platform-level improvements and began providing fundamental technologies and features in a move to bring more benefits to users. Intel's vision of a balanced platform is moving beyond gigahertz (GHz) and expanding the company’s focus on the fundamental technologies and features for delivering greater value and functionality. Intel has realigned its strategy and moved resources away from pure GHz-oriented projects and the result is the company embracing multi-core architecture. Intel also continued to invest in its manufacturing capacity during the 2000 economic downturn to ensure that it has the capacity to deliver processors, including multi-core processors, in high volume and at affordable price points.

Multi-core processor capability is central to Intel's platform-centric approach. By enabling enhanced performance, reduced power consumption and more efficient simultaneous processing of multiple tasks, multi-core processors promise to improve the user experience in home and business environments.

Understanding multi-core processor architecture
Explained most simply, multi-core processor architecture entails silicon design engineers placing two or more Pentium® processor-based "execution cores," or computational engines, within a single processor. This multi-core processor plugs directly into a single processor socket, but the operating system perceives each of its execution cores as a discrete logical processor, with all the associated execution resources.

The idea behind this implementation of the chip's internal architecture is in essence a "divide and conquer" strategy. In other words, by divvying up the computational work performed by the single Pentium microprocessor core in traditional microprocessors and spreading it over multiple execution cores, a multi-core processor can perform more work within a given clock cycle. Thus, it is designed to deliver a better overall user experience. To enable this improvement, the software running on the platform must be written such that it can spread its workload across multiple execution cores. This functionality is called thread-level parallelism or "threading," and applications and operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows XP) that are written to support it are referred to as “threaded�? or "multi-threaded."