Necromancer: enhancing system throughput by animating dead cores

Aggressive technology scaling into the nanometer regime has led to a host of reliability challenges in the last several years. Unlike onchip caches, which can be efficiently protected using conventional schemes, the general core area is less homogeneous and structured, making tolerating defects a much more challenging problem. Due to the lack of effective solutions, disabling non-functional cores is a common practice in industry to enhance manufacturing yield, which results in a significant reduction in system throughput. Although a faulty core cannot be trusted to correctly execute programs, we observe in this work that for most defects, when starting from a valid architectural state, execution traces on a defective core actually coarsely resemble those of fault-free executions. In light of this insight, we propose a robust and heterogeneous core coupling execution scheme, Necromancer, that exploits a functionally dead core to improve system throughput by supplying hints regarding ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Amin Ansari, Shuguang Feng, Shantanu Gupta, Scott A. Mahlke
• Keywords: Dead Core, Hardware, Heterogeneous Core Coupling, ISCA 2010, Lightweight Core