抄録
The pursuit of instruction-level parallelism using more transistors produces diminishing returns and also increases power dissipation of general purpose processors. This paper studies a chip multi-processor (CMP) with smaller processor cores as a means to achieve high aggregate throughput and improved energy efficiency. The benefit of this design approach increases as the number of cores on a chip increases, as enabled by semiconductor process scaling. The feasibility of a processor core 40% of the size of a baseline high performance processor that delivers about 70% of its performance is shown. The CMP populated by smaller cores to fill the same silicon area delivers 2.3 times higher performance in transaction processing represented by TPC-C benchmarks than the baseline processor scaled into the same technology. The CMP also achieves 38% higher energy efficiency.
