Heterogeneous system coherence for integrated CPU-GPU systems
Jason Lowe-Power, Arkaprava Basu, Junli Gu, Sooraj Puthoor, Bradford M. Beckmann, Mark D. Hill, Steven K. Reinhardt, David Alvra Wood · 2013
Many future heterogeneous systems will integrate CPUs and GPUs physically on a single chip and logically connect them via shared memory to avoid explicit data copying. Making this shared memory coherent facilitates programming and fine-grained sharing, but throughput-oriented GPUs can overwhelm CPUs with coherence requests not well-filtered by caches. Meanwhile, region coherence has been proposed for CPU-only systems to reduce snoop bandwidth by obtaining coherence permissions for large regions.