A manycore microprocessor is a microprocessor that comprises of a large number of physical cores with the goal of achieving higher degree of explicit parallelism. The cores need not be identical nor necessarily fully-featured. Manycore processors often focus on optimizing specific aspects such as power or throughput (i.e. optimized for specific types of algorithms or tasks) at the expense of other characteristics (e.g. serial code performance, generality).
The term differs from a multi-core microprocessor which typically contains groups of homogeneous cores designed to deliver high performance for both serial and parallel code, preventing it from making the kind of sacrifices a many-core microprocessor can. The term "many-core" does not denote a specific number of cores but rather their capabilities and intended tasks. For example the Core i7-6950X is a deca-core processor that would generally be considered a multi-core processor but not a many-core processor, while MIT's 16-core RAW and Tilera's 64-core TILE64 would be both.
Overview
Early research
Research chips
