Technology: Machine vision: Divide and Conquer

Increased computing power as expected by the customers has led to the development of more processing cores into a single chip. Matt Slaughter, product marketing engineer for vision at Austin, Texas-based National Instruments, said a two-core chip has almost double the vision processing capability of one with a single core, while a four-core chip offers about 3.5 times the power. Intel Corporation has developed an 80 cores research chip which delivers more than a trillion calculations per second of performance. The software must be properly designed. Successfully using a multi core approach requires that a task be divided or copied, with each segment worked on by a separate core. Santa Clara, California based Intel estimates that some high-performance applications will require 2 to 4 GB of memory per core.