The Cydra-5 departmental supercomputer is the first minisupercomputer designed by Cydrome . It was completed in 1987. At that time Cydra-5 cost from $ 0.5 million to $ 1 million but achieved one-half the performance of contemporary supercomputers which cost around 10 times as much, $ 10 million to $ 20 million.
10-463: The Cydra-5 is a heterogeneous multiprocessing system. There are two types of processors functionally specialized for different components of workload . The numerical processor works on numerical computations and uses Cydrome’s "directed-dataflow" architecture, a variant of VLIW . The general-purpose processor is based around the Motorola 68020 processor, and works on non-numerical instructions to keep
20-413: A system-on-chip , or SoC. For example, many new processors now include built-in logic for interfacing with other devices ( SATA , PCI , Ethernet , USB , RFID , radios , UARTs , and memory controllers ), as well as programmable functional units and hardware accelerators ( GPUs , cryptography co-processors , programmable network processors, A/V encoders/decoders, etc.). Recent findings show that
30-488: A "big" or P-core and a more power efficient core usually known as a "small" or E-core. The terms P- and E-cores are usually used in relation to Intel's implementation of hetereogeneous computing, while the terms big and little cores are usually used in relation to the ARM architecture. Some processors have three categories of core, prime, performance and efficiency cores, with prime cores having higher performance than performance cores;
40-425: A different microarchitecture ( floating point number processing is a special case of this - not usually referred to as heterogeneous). In the past heterogeneous computing meant different ISAs had to be handled differently, while in a modern example, Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) systems eliminate the difference (for the user) while using multiple processor types (typically CPUs and GPUs ), usually on
50-464: A heterogeneous-ISA chip multiprocessor that exploits diversity offered by multiple ISAs can outperform the best same-ISA homogeneous architecture by as much as 21% with 23% energy savings and a reduction of 32% in Energy Delay Product (EDP). AMD's 2014 announcement on its pin-compatible ARM and x86 SoCs, codename Project Skybridge, suggested a heterogeneous-ISA (ARM+x86) chip multiprocessor in
60-446: A prime core is known as "big", a performance core is known as "medium", and an efficiency core is known as "small". A common use of such topology is to provide better power efficiency, especially in mobile SoCs. Heterogeneous computing systems present new challenges not found in typical homogeneous systems. The presence of multiple processing elements raises all of the issues involved with homogeneous parallel processing systems, while
70-410: The making. A system with heterogeneous CPU topology is a system where the same ISA is used, but the cores themselves are different in speed. The setup is more similar to a symmetric multiprocessor . (Although such systems are technically asymmetric multiprocessors , the cores do not differ in roles or device access.) There are typically two types of cores: a higher performance core usually known as
80-617: The numerical processor free from that work. However, these two processors share memory and peripherals, and the operating system manages both, so the user is presented with the illusion of a uniprocessor system. The host processor/attached processor approach was rejected because of its performance limitations. This supercomputer-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Heterogeneous computing Heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processor or core . These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding
90-564: The same integrated circuit , to provide the best of both worlds: general GPU processing (apart from the GPU's well-known 3D graphics rendering capabilities, it can also perform mathematically intensive computations on very large data-sets), while CPUs can run the operating system and perform traditional serial tasks. The level of heterogeneity in modern computing systems is gradually increasing as further scaling of fabrication technologies allows for formerly discrete components to become integrated parts of
100-409: The same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors , usually incorporating specialized processing capabilities to handle particular tasks. Usually heterogeneity in the context of computing refers to different instruction-set architectures (ISA), where the main processor has one and other processors have another - usually a very different - architecture (maybe more than one), not just
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