The Global Front End is a hardware scheduler that sends instructions to different virtual cores. The underlying physical cores have some unique communications and synchronization hardware to facilitate the work.

Two former Intel engineers who faced the power wall that ended frequency scaling are describing their startup’s technology that hopes to surmount it. Soft Machines aims to bring a new level of parallelism to single-threaded software that could enable performance gains for any processor.

The startup has attracted US$125 million in financing since it was formed in 2008, making it one of the few well-funded processor startups these days -- and certainly not the fastest to get to market. It hopes to close soon a “huge” round of investment that will take it through the next three years when it aims to help its first customers bring working chips to market.

The company is showing a working prototype of a 32-bit processor that uses its microarchitecture and software to provide about twice the performance of 32-bit ARM and x86 chips. It delivers about 40 percent more than Intel’s current 64-bit Haswell processor, the startup claims.

Overall, the company claims its approach can deliver the same performance at a third or a quarter of the power of conventional processors or 1.7x to 2.2x the performance at the same power level. It claims the approach can be used on applications ranging from embedded devices to datacenter servers.

This article was originally published on EETimes.

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