Having reached their peak potential, computer chips are not getting any faster. So chipmakers are configuring additional cores or processing units on a single platform in order to skirt this problem.

Today, a typical chip might have six or eight cores, all communicating with one another over a single bundle of wires, called a bus. With a bus, however, only one pair of cores can talk at a time, which would be a serious limitation in chips with hundreds or even thousands of cores, envisioned as the future of computing.