计算机专业时文选读汇编（专业英语）.docVIP

计算机专业时文选读(974) Multicore Processors In 1965, when he first set out what we now call Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore (who later co-founded Intel Corp.) said the number of components that could be packed onto an integrated circuit would double every year or so (later amended to 18 months). In 1971, Intel抯 4004 CPU had 2,300 transistors. In 1982, the 80286 debuted with 134,000 transistors. Now, run-of-the-mill CPUs count upward of 200 million transistors, and Intel is scheduled to release a processor with 1.7 billion transistors for later this year. For years, such progress in CPUs was clearly predictable: Successive generations of semiconductor technology gave us bigger, more powerful processors on ever-thinner silicon substrates operating at increasing clock speeds. These smaller, faster transistors use less electricity, too. But there抯 a catch. It turns out that as operating voltages get lower, a significant amount of electricity simply leaks away and ends up generating excessive heat, requiring much more attention to processor cooling and limiting the potential speed advance棗think of this as a thermal barrier. To break through that barrier, processor makers are adopting a new strategy, packing two or more complete, independent processor cores, or CPUs, onto a single chip. This multicore processor plugs directly into a single socket on the motherboard, and the operating system sees each of the execution cores as a discrete logical processor that is independently controllable. Having two separate CPUs allows each one to run somewhat slower, and thus cooler, and still improve overall throughput for the machine in most cases. From one perspective, this is merely an extension of the design thinking that has for several years given us n-way servers using two or more standard CPUs; we