As I said in my comment to Grant’s comment on my blog, I think that the phase change in how chips work as we reach some core count can be explained as the result of underlying design decisions. In the cores, their interconnects, memories, communication structure, something… to simply build a 100-core chip will require certain things to be done differently compared to a 4-core homogeneous SMP processor unit like a Core 2 Quad (to use a very mundane an uninteresting example of mainstream architecture). And I really think that is where we need to have a taxonomy to help us.

I’m not sure that we can keep the core count completely out of taxonomies, however. This is simply because I have a suspicion that things change qualitatively, and not just quantitatively, as you go from 1 to 2 to 4 to 10 to 100 to 1000 to ???? cores. Somewhere along that increment, I suspect that we will want to treat systems differently, and programme them differently, and architect them differently. What the “magic” numbers will be in this incremental continuum, that separate multi-core systems of type X from type Y, I don’t know yet (suggestions always welcome). Note that there is no science here - just a gut feel (from a middle-aged or older gut!)

Great blog, by the way!

Reading (perhaps incorrectly) between the lines, it sounds as though the Multicore Association is working on a taxonomy of terms and types of architectural and programming model approaches. If that is the case, then it would be better to open up now rather than put something out that does not represent the full spectrum of the community After all, there are and have been many people in academia and industry working in this area who are not members of your association who have information and ideas to contribute.
Please tell us more…………enquiring minds want to know!

Best, Grant