Single-Chip Multiprocessors: The Next Wave of Computer Architecture Innovation
Gurindar S. Sohi · 2004
The past 25 years have been a very exciting time for computer architecture. A lot of this excitement was due to new opportunities made available by semiconductor technology: once basic uniprocessor functionality could be implemented on a chip, additional transistor resources could be used for innovative 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 period of excitement for multiprocessors. Semiconductor technology currently allows us to build a small chip multiprocessor. While the microarchitecture of the initial chip multiprocessors differs little from that of a traditional multiprocessor built with multiple chips, advances in semiconductor technology will allow us to rethink the microarchitecture of multiprocessors. Now is the time to start investigating innovative ways of architecting chip multiprocessors. This talk will try to provide some initial directions towards this overall research agenda.