Wave Report - Processor Forum 2005:
"Microprocessors, and in particular, the X86 family, have hit a brick wall with power dissipation when clock speed is the means to increase processor performance. In particular, it is power density on the chip not just average power. Power densities are at 300 to 400 W/sq cm. The solution is to put more processor cores, at lower clock speeds on the same die, to effectively provide greater computational power at lower power densities. With this comes a penalty that requires increased software complexity to take advantage of the multi-core architecture. One of the issues is Where will this play out in the number of cores? A compelling case was made by Azul that there is also a thermal barrier with multi-core. Effectively a many core architecture will face the same limits as single core does today. Today's current issue is: what are the benefits of multi-core to users of traditional desktop PCs?"
