The broader category of multi-core processors, by contrast, are usually designed to efficiently run both parallel and serial code, and therefore place more emphasis on high single-thread performance (e.g. devoting more silicon to out-of-order execution, deeper pipelines, more superscalar execution units, and larger, more general caches), and shared memory.
These techniques devote runtime resources toward figuring out implicit parallelism in a single thread.
Manycore processors may bypass this with methods such as message passing,[1] scratchpad memory, DMA,[2] partitioned global address space,[3] or read-only/non-coherent caches.
A manycore processor using a network on a chip and local memories gives software the opportunity to explicitly optimise the spatial layout of tasks (e.g. as seen in tooling developed for TrueNorth).
A number of computers built from multicore processors have one million or more individual CPU cores.