Olukotun, K., Nayfeh, B. A., Hammond, L., Wilson, K., & Chang, K. (1996). The Case for a Single-Chip Multiprocessor. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS VII), 2–11.

A multi-core processor contains multiple separate processing units, packaged on the same integrated circuit. This provides a significant performance advantage over single-core designs, when executing programs that use parallel computing techniques such as multithreading.

Pioneered by Kunle Olukotun and colleagues from Stanford in the mid-1990s, multi-core designs have since become the standard for general-purpose consumer devices as well as specific applications that include graphics, networking, and signal processing.

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