Testing unbuilt chips
For the last decade or so, computer chip manufacturers have been increasing the speed of their chips by giving them extra processing units, or “cores.” Most major manufacturers now offer chips with eight, 10 or even 12 cores.But if chips are to continue improving at the rate we’ve grown accustomed to — doubling in power roughly every 18 months — they’ll soon require hundreds and even thousands of cores. Academic and industry researchers are full of ideas for improving the performance of multicore chips, but there’s always the possibility that an approach that seems to work well with 24 or 48 cores may introduce catastrophic problems when the core count gets higher. No chip manufacturer will take a chance on an innovative chip design without overwhelming evidence that it works as advertised.As a research tool, an MIT group that specializes in computer architecture has developed a software simulator, dubbed Hornet,...