A research team claims to have doubled the performance of a computer. They utilize a new technique. The advantage is that it does not require any new hardware. However, it may still take some time before this technique is available on our systems.
Researchers from the University of California, Riverside, claim that they would be able to double the performance of any modern PC. The twist here: This all works without a prior hardware upgrade.
The research team presented their findings and described a new system called “simultaneous and heterogeneous multithreading” (SHMT). The technical essay can be found online at dl.amc.org.
But does this mean that PC gaming will finally become affordable again? You shouldn’t get too excited just yet, as you won’t be able to use the technology immediately.
New technology aims to accelerate processes and thereby improve performance
Modern computers currently consist of several processors. These include the CPU, the graphics processor of the graphics card, or the processing cores responsible for machine learning (TPU).
Since different parts of the PC are responsible for executing different workloads through instructions, bottlenecks and latency occur between the data. The data must be transferred between the processors, and that takes time and thus reduces performance.
What exactly does SHMT do here? SHMT aims to solve the problem by allowing the simultaneous execution of a single task through multiple processes. This not only reduces the workload per processor but also accelerates the efficiency of the task and consumes less energy.
The researchers’ results are impressive:
- The team found that the integration of SHMT into various test systems led to a processing speed increase of up to 1.95 times.
- Additionally, the energy consumption of the test system decreased by almost 51%.
- By the way, an Edge TPU is used. An Edge TPU is a chip specifically designed by Google to use AI on edge devices.
When will the technology be available? According to the team, current devices need to undergo a quality test. This will determine if there are incompatible processor architectures or components. Therefore, it is still unclear when we will benefit from this technology. However, the initial results are said to look promising.
Perhaps we will actually save ourselves some costly hardware upgrades for our gaming PC in the future.
By the way, the most powerful PC in the world is being built in Germany. A new supercomputer is being constructed in Jülich. It is supposed to be faster than all other systems. In the future, it will be mainly used for AI training:
