Piranha: a scalable architecture based on single-chip multiprocessing

The microprocessor industry is currently struggling with higher development costs and longer design times that arise from exceedingly complex processors that are pushing the limits of instructionlevel parallelism. Meanwhile, such designs are especially ill suited for important commercial applications, such as on-line transaction processing (OLTP), which suffer from large memory stall times and exhibit little instruction-level parallelism. Given that commercial applications constitute by far the most important market for high-performance servers, the above trends emphasize the need to consider alternative processor designs that specifically target such workloads. The abundance of explicit thread-level parallelism in commercial workloads, along with advances in semiconductor integration density, identify chip multiprocessing (CMP) as potentially the most promising approach for designing processors targeted at commercial servers. This paper describes the Piranha system, a research protot...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Luiz André Barroso, Kourosh Gharachorloo, Robert McNamara, Andreas Nowatzyk, Shaz Qadeer, Barton Sano, Scott Smith, Robert Stets, Ben Verghese
• Keywords: Chip Multiprocessing, Hardware, ISCA 2000, Processor Core, Single Chip