Apple has filed another patent. And this time is for something really interesting and potentially futuristic. The US Patent & Trademark Office has received Apples solicitation to registers multiple patents affiliated to the concept of macroscalar processor architecture.
Scattered rumors about such technology have been randomly spotted, because reportedly Apple has been focusing on it since 2004. The patents discussed here appear to be the continuation sort, meaning that they appear to complement and expand upon previously granted patents.
The inventor of the technology is listed as being Jeffry Gonion who has worked with Apple as Platform Architect since 2003, when the Cupertino company snatched him from the Geneva-based semiconductor firm SMMicroelectornics.
So what is this macroscalar technology supposed to achieve? Well basically processors benefiting from it would be able to maintain separate pipelines allowing the device sporting them to run multiple set of instructions, without having to halt and wait for the first to be completed.
The parallelism is parallelism "generated at run-time, rather than scavenged, improving efficiency and performance while reducing power dissipation per task. The number of program registers is increased considerably, and over-specification of binary code for a specific processor is avoided, replaced by mechanisms which may ensure that software for prior versions of the processors automatically utilize additional execution resources in future versions."
Recently filled patent are a reason to get excited about them being incorporated into the iPhone 5 and iPad 3, but in all honesty it is too early to tell. Even if this technology has been developing in Apples labs for years, it is still not a good indicator that it will jump out and unto the new devices this very year.
Source: Main Device
