Single-chip multiprocessors: the rebirth of parallel processing
Guri Sohi · International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques · 2003
After a couple of decades of excitement, multiprocessors have played second fiddle to instruction-level parallelism and uniprocessors since the early 1990s. A significant reason for the recent excitement in uniprocessors was the revolution in microarchitecture made possible by the increasing transistor resources. Once technology allowed a simple uniprocessor to be implemented on a single chip (in the mid 1980s), researchers started looking at radically different ways of implementing uniprocessor microarchitectures. The net result is that the microarchitecture of a high-performance uniprocessor today barely resembles that of one from 20 years ago. Today we stand at the doorstep of a similar revolution for multiprocessors. Semiconductor technology currently allows us to build a small chip multiprocessor, but the multiarchitecture--the microarchitecture of the multiprocessor--is no different from that of a traditional multiprocessor built with multiple chips. Now is the time to start to rethink the multiarchitecture of a chip multiprocessor and to come up with novel ways of building and using chip multiprocessors. This talk is an attempt to provide some initial directions towards this overall research agenda.