By Joab Jackson, IDG News
A study suggests the emergence of multicore processors will support an overhaul of computing architecture and much faster operations.

To use multicore processors effectively the technology industry needs to radically rethink the basic computer architecture it has used over the past 50 years, a University of Maryland researcher argues in the January edition of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) flagship Communications publication.

“The recent dramatic shift from single-processor computer systems to many-processor parallel ones requires reinventing much of computer science to build and program the new systems,” argues Uzi Vishkin, a professor at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, in the paper.

Vishkin even offers a new architecture abstraction, which he calls ICE (Immediate Concurrent Execution), and which he developed with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The basic computer architecture we use today is based on the concepts put forth by mathematician John von Neumann in the 1940s. In his architecture, data and programs are held in computer memory and fed to the computer’s CPU. Programs are executed using a program counter, which supplies the CPU the address of the next instruction in memory to execute.

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