Is multicore hype or reality?

摘要

For many years, processors and memory evolved more or less in lockstep. Early CPUs like the Z80 required a number of machine cycles to execute even a NOP instruction. At the few-megahertz clock rates then common, processor speeds nicely matched EPROM and SRAM cycle times. But for a time, memory speeds increased faster than CPU clock rates. The 8088/6 had a prefetcher to better balance fast memory to a slow processor. A very small (4 to 6 bytes) FIFO isolated the core from a bus interface unit (BIU).