OUTRIDER: efficient memory latency tolerance with decoupled strands

• Authors: Neal Clayton Crago;Sanjay Jeram Patel
• Venue: Proceedings of the 38th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
• Year: 2011

We present OUTRIDER, an architecture for throughput-oriented processors that provides memory latency tolerance to improve performance on highly threaded workloads. OUTRIDER enables a single thread of execution to be presented to the architecture as multiple decoupled instruction streams that separate memory-accessing and memory-consuming instructions. The key insight is that by decoupling the instruction streams, the processor pipeline can tolerate memory latency in a way similar to out-of-order designs while relying on a low-complexity in-order micro-architecture. Moreover, instead of adding more threads as is done in modern GPUs, OUTRIDER can tolerate memory latency with fewer threads and reduced contention for resources shared amongst threads. We demonstrate that OUTRIDER can outperform single threaded cores by 23-131% and a 4-way simultaneous multithreaded core by up to 87% on data parallel applications in a 1024-core system. Moreover, OUTRIDER achieves these performance gains without incurring the overhead of additional hardware thread contexts, which results in improved area efficiency compared to a multithreaded core.