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Abstract

Current high-end microprocessors achieve high performance as a result of adding more features and therefore increasing complexity. This paper makes the case for a Chip-Multiprocessor based on the Data-Driven Multithreading (DDM-CMP) execution model in order to overcome the limitations of current design trends. Data-Driven Multithreading (DDM) is a multithreading model that effectively hides the communication delay and synchronization overheads. DDM-CMP avoids the complexity of other designs by combining simple commodity microprocessors with a small hardware overhead for thread scheduling and an interconnection network. Preliminary experimental results show that a DDM-CMP chip of the same hardware budget as a high-end commercial microprocessor, clocked at the same frequency, achieves a speedup of up to 18.5 with a 78–81% power consumption of the commercial chip. Overall, the estimated results for the proposed DDM-CMP architecture show a significant benefit in terms of both speedup and power consumption making it an attractive architecture for future processors.

Keywords  Chip multiprocessor - multithreading - parallel processing - data-driven execution

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