Earlier this month Intel’s European research unit posted an overview of a new project they are working on to improve the performance of single threaded apps on multicore processors

Researchers from Intel Labs Barcelona now presented “Anaphase” which is a novel hardware/software hybrid approach to leverage multiple cores in order to improve single-thread performance on multi-core processors. This research focuses on different speculative techniques to automatically partition single thread applications to be processed on multiple cores.
On the hardware side, a new unit called “Inter-Core Memory Coherency Module” (ICMC) could be integrated into the die of future processors. The ICMC updates the memory state in program order, detects memory violations and implements check-pointing and recovery mechanisms, so that it can execute the resulting partitioned applications on multiple cores.

The company says that this is a research project right now, but it is looking for ways to incorporate the technology into future hardware. If you’d like to know more, here’s a link to a recently published paper.