Current trends in processor design have migrated toward chip multiprocessors (CMPs). CMPs are designed to exploit both instruction-level parallelism (ILP) within processors and thread-level parallelism (TLP) within and across processors. However, the conventional design of current CMPs is forced to make a choice between high single-thread performance and high peak throughput. This inability to adjust to varying levels of ILP and TLP results in processor inefficiency. To cope with the dilemma of designing CMPs confronted by the processor designers, this dissertation proposed the hyperscalar concept for current multi-core designs. The hyperscalar concept enables the multi-core architectures to dynamically group many scalar in-order cores as a superscalar processor to accelerate a sequential thread. The reconfigure feature of hyperscalar architecture contributes to the high flexibility in adapting different types of applications, providing high single-thread performance when thread level parallelism (TLP) is low and high throughput when TLP is high.
Based on the hyperscalar concept, this dissertation first proposed a hyperscalar dual-core architecture. It can play three different roles (a 2-issue statically scheduled superscalar processor, a homogeneous dual-core processor, or a standalone single-core processor). An Instruction-dependency Analyzer (IA) that connects two scalar in-order cores is designed to handle the role switching. The design of IA makes it possible for the two cores to work together like a 2-issue statically scheduled superscalar processor. The IA dispatches instructions with data dependencies to the same core so that the data dependencies can be resolved by existing forwarding paths in the core. Simulation results show that when the proposed architecture works in a statically scheduled superscalar manner, it achieves a 30.3% higher instructions per cycle (IPC) than the traditional five-stage pipelined core based on 35 benchmarks from the MiBench suite. The increases in area and power for extending a homogeneous dual-core processor to a hyperscalar dual-core processor are only 1.8% and 1.75%, respectively, using 90nm CMOS technology.
On top of that, this dissertation further extended the hyperscalar dual-core architecture to hyperscalar multi-core architecture capable of flexibly providing high throughput for uniform parallel application as well as high performance for more general workloads. It can dynamically unite many scalar cores as a larger OOO superscalar processor to accelerate a thread. To accomplish this, the Virtual Shared Register File (VSRF) concept was proposed to help the instructions of a thread in different cores can logically face a uniform set of register file. Simulation results show that the 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32-core-united configurations of the hyperscalar multi-core architecture archive 95%, 84%, 82%, 85%, and 90% of the performance of the monolithic 2, 4,8, 16, and 32-issue OOO superscalar processors based the SPEC2000 benchmarks.
Finally, this dissertation proposed a new technology, called multi-streaming SIMD, applicable for hyperscalar architecture to efficiently exploit data-level parallelism (DLP). The multi-streaming SIMD technology enables current multimedia extensions to simultaneously manipulate multiple data streams. Simulation results show that when a multi-streaming SIMD computing engine has four 4-register multimedia operation storage units, it provides a factor of 3.3x to 5.5x performance enhancement for traditional MMX extensions on twelve multimedia kernels. After exploring the above research topics discussed in this dissertation, a promising architecture for future multi-core designs was realized.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0907111-220723 |
| Date | 07 September 2011 |
| Creators | Chou, Yu-Liang |
| Contributors | Shiann-Rong Kuang, Chung-Ping Chung, Shie-Jue Lee, Shen-Fu Hsiao, Ce-Kuen Shieh, Jih-Ching Chiu |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0907111-220723 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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