Memory Performance and Scalability of Intel's and AMD's Dual-Core Processors: A Case Study

As Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) has become the mainstream in processor architectures, Intel and AMD have introduced their dual-core processors to the PC market. In this paper, performance studies on an Intel Core 2 Duo, an Intel Pentium D and an AMD Athlon 64X2 processor are reported. According to the design specifications, key derivations exist in the critical memory hierarchy architecture among these dual-core processors. In addition to the overall execution time and throughput measurement using both multiprogrammed and multi-threaded workloads, this paper provides detailed analysis on the memory hierarchy performance and on the performance scalability between single and dual cores. Our results indicate that for the best performance and scalability, it is important to have (1) fast cache-to-cache communication, (2) large L2 or shared capacity, (3) fast L2 to core latency, and (4) fair cache resource sharing. Three dual-core processors that we studied have shown benefits of some of thes...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IPCCC
• Authors: Lu Peng, Jih-Kwon Peir, Tribuvan K. Prakash, Yen-Kuang Chen, David M. Koppelman
• Keywords: Communications, Core 2 Duo, Dual-core Processors, IPCCC 2007, Performance