Due to the limitations of instruction-level parallelism, thread-level parallelism has become a popular way to improve processor performance. One example is the IBM POWER5TM processor, a two-context simultaneous-multithreaded dual-core chip. In each SMT ...

Modern processors rely on memory dependence prediction to execute load instructions as early as possible, speculating that they are not dependent on an earlier, unissued store. To date, the most sophisticated dependence predictors, such as Store Sets, ...

Within-die process variation causes individual cores in a ChipMultiprocessor (CMP) to differ substantially in both static powerconsumed and maximum frequency supported. In this environment,ignoring variation effects whenscheduling applications or when ...

The current trend is for processors to deliver dramatic improvements in parallel performance while only modestly improving serial performance. Parallel performance is harvested through vector/SIMD instructions as well as multithreading (through both ...

Process variations are poised to significantly degrade performance benefits sought by moving to the next nanoscale technology node. Parameter fluctuations in devices can introduce large variations in peak operation among chips, among cores on a single ...

Recently, Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures have gained popularity to address the interconnect delay problem for designing CMP / multi-core / SoC systems in deep sub-micron technology. However, almost all prior studies have focused on 2D NoC designs. ...

Current state-of-the-art on-chip networks provide efficiency, high throughput, and low latency for one-to-one (unicast) traffic. The presence of one-to-many (multicast) or one-to-all (broadcast) traffic can significantly degrade the performance of these ...

As CMOS technology scales and more transistors are packed on to the same chip, soft error reliability has become an increasingly important design issue for processors. Prior research has shown that there is significant architecture-level masking, and ...

In a chip-multiprocessor (CMP) system, the DRAM system isshared among cores. In a shared DRAM system, requests from athread can not only delay requests from other threads by causingbank/bus/row-buffer conflicts but they can also destroy other threads’...

This paper seeks to understand and design next-generation servers for emerging "warehouse-computing" environments. We make two key contributions. First, we put together a detailed evaluation infrastructure including a new benchmark suite for warehouse-...

We expect that many-core microprocessors will push performance per chip from the 10 gigaflop to the 10 teraflop range in the coming decade. To support this increased performance, memory and inter-core bandwidths will also have to scale by orders of ...

The ultimate goal of computer design is to satisfy the end-user. In particular computing domains, such as interactive applications, there exists a variation in user expectations and user satisfaction relative to the performance of existing computer ...

As the number of cores per die increases, be they processors, memory blocks, or custom accelerators, the on-chip interconnect the cores use to communicate gains importance. We begin this study with an area-performance analysis of the interconnect design ...

Dynamic information flow tracking (also known as taint tracking) is an appealing approach to combat various security attacks. However, the performance of applications can severely degrade without hardware support for tracking taints. This paper observes ...

A high-concurrency transactional memory (TM) implementation needs to track concurrent accesses, buffer speculative updates, and manage conflicts. We present a system, FlexTM (FLEXible Transactional Memory), that coordinates four decoupled hardware ...

Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures have been adopted by a growing number of multi-core designs as a flexible and scalable solution to the increasing wire delay constraints in the deep sub-micron regime. However, the shrinking feature size limits the ...

Multicore processors have emerged as a powerful platform on which to efficiently exploit thread-level parallelism (TLP). However, due to Amdahl’s Law, such designs will be increasingly limited by the remaining sequential components of applications. To ...