Comparing memory systems for chip multiprocessors

There are two basic models for the on-chip memory in CMP systems: hardware-managed coherent caches and software-managed streaming memory. This paper performs a direct comparison of the two models under the same set of assumptions about technology, area, and computational capabilities. The goal is to quantify how and when they differ in terms of performance, energy consumption, bandwidth requirements, and latency tolerance for generalpurpose CMPs. We demonstrate that for data-parallel applications, the cache-based and streaming models perform and scale equally well. For certain applications with little data reuse, streaming scales better due to better bandwidth use and macroscopic software pre

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Jacob Leverich, Hideho Arakida, Alex Solomatnikov, Amin Firoozshahian, Mark Horowitz, Christos Kozyrakis
• Keywords: Hardware, Hardware-managed Coherent Caches, ISCA 2007, On-chip Memory, Software-managed Streaming Memory