Concluding remarks

While the situation for multicores is clearly established, the same is far from true for manycores.

For scientific computing applications, the SW26010 processor in the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer remains a singular point. On the other hand, for the same order of magnitude of power dissipation, Intel's Xeon Phi approach underperforms graphics processors, leading Intel to abandon them in anticipation of a new approach to Exascale, which could be based on GPUs and FPGAs.

For high-performance mobile and embedded applications, the outlook is different, with mixed results. Very low-power approaches, such as Epiphany, are used in 16- and 64-core versions as coprocessors in Adapteva's Parallela boards aimed at the high-performance, low-power mobile and embedded market. The 1,024-core Epiphany-V version, on the other hand, was a failure, as no...