Physical modeling has been widely used for sound synthesis since it synthesizes high quality sound which is similar to real-sound for musical instruments. However, physical modeling requires a lot of parameters to synthesize a large number of sounds simultaneously for the musical instrument, preventing its real-time processing. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) based multi-core processor that supports real-time processing of sound synthesis of gayageum which is a representative Korean traditional musical instrument. The proposed SIMD-base multi-core processor consists of 12 processing elements (PE) to control 12 strings of gayageum in which each PE supports modeling of the corresponding string. The proposed SIMD-based multi-core processor can generate synthesized sounds of 12 strings simultaneously after receiving excitation signals and parameters of each string as an input.Experimental results using a sampling reate 44.1 kHz and 16 bits quantization show that synthesis sound using the proposed multi-core processor was very similar to the original sound. In addition, the proposed multi-core processor outperforms commercial processors(TI's TMS320C6416, ARM926EJ-S, ARM1020E) in terms of execution time (5.6~11.4x better) and energy efficiency (about 553~1,424x better).