Example of Homogeneous Multi-core

Intel Core i7

Intel's CPU for High-end desktop and workstation PC using the Intel Nehalem microarchitecture.

Can process up to 8 thread in parallel (with 4 cores).

The first implementation contains 4 cores.

Example of Heterogeneous Multi-core

Cell Broadband Engine

Asymmetric and Heterogeneous Multi-core processor jointly developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM.

Contains one general purpose processor named PPE and 8 computing cores named SPE. (Cell/B.E. Hardware Structure)

Famous as a main processor of PLAYSTATION 3.

Used in World7s fastest Supercomputer "Roadrunner".

Example of GPU

NVIDIA Tesla

General purpose GPU (GPGPU) for high performance computing developed by NVIDIA.

Contains 240 streaming processor cores.

Used in "TSUBAME", the Supercomputer of Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The CUDA, NVIDIA's C language IDE for GPGPU is available.

Others

SpursEngine

Derived processor of Cell/B.E. developed by Toshiba.

Mixture of 4 SPEs and dedicated circuit of MPEG-2 and H.264 encoder/decoder.

Low power consumption, under 20W.