Soft Machines Startup Promises 'Virtual Cores' Twice As Fast As Physical Cores on CPU

[froggyboy604]

 
A new well-funded startup called "Soft Machines," created by chip veterans, is working on a new type of processor based on the "Virtual Instruction Set Computing" (or VISC, as opposed to RISC or CISC) architecture. The firm is essentially creating "virtual cores" that it says are 1.7-2.2 times faster for a given single-threaded task (scoring 2.1 instructions per core in SPEC 2006 benchmark) compared to Intel Haswell's 1.39 instructions per clock.
 
Most apps or programs aren't usually optimized for multi-core processors or multiple threads, so they end up using a single core, even if the processor has more. That's wasted performance, and wasted time, as the processing could happen much faster if it used all or most of the cores.
 
Read More
 
It's amazing that software can make it possible to add virtual cores to a CPU, and it is faster than physical cores.
 
I wonder if there would be faster virtual RAM which is faster than real RAM in the future.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

So when they say, virtual cores. Do they mean they aren't there physically?

 

[froggyboy604]

I think there are still physical cores, but software on the cores can turn 1 physical cores into two or more cores when needed to improve the performance of some tasks.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

Ahh so it's like partitioning them then? That would make them more useful.