In my previous article, Understanding the Microprocessor, I gave a high-level overview of what a microprocessor is and how it functions. I talked about the kinds of tasks it performs and the different ...

Multi-core processors theoretically can run many threads of code in parallel, but some categories of operation currently bog down attempts to raise overall performance by parallelizing computing. Is ...

What then, is the major obstacle that is in the way of producing, say, 10GHz processors? For a start the Intel blog says heat is a problem but isn't the biggest hurdle that needs to be overcome to ...

If you’ve been reading Ars for any length of time, then you know that there are two terms that always come up in any of my articles: pipelining and superscalar execution. These two fundamental ...