
Summary form only given. At a point in time when it is harder to harvest more instruction-level parallelism and to push the clock frequency to higher levels, industry has opted for integrating multiple processor cores on a chip. It is an attractive way of reducing the verification time by simply replicating moderately complex cores on a chip, but it introduces several challenges. The first challenge is to transform the processing power of multiple cores to a high application performance. The second challenge is to bridge the increasing speedgap between processor and memory by more elaborate on-chip memory hierarchies. Related to the second challenge is how to make more effective use of the limited bandwidth out of and into the chip. A third cross-cutting challenge is how we can move forward and yet manage the complexity of billion transistor chips. In this paper the author elaborates on the opportunities that chip-multiprocessing offer along with the research issues that it introduces. Even if multiprocessing has been studied for more than two decades, the tight integration of cores and their on-chip memory subsystems opens up new unexplored terrains. The author discusses and reflects upon approaches to explore new forms of parallelism as well as approaches to manage the on-chip cache hierarchies in the pursuit of making multi-core chips deliver higher performance.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 6 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 10% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
