Simultaneous multithreading: maximizing on-chip parallelism
ISCA '95 Proceedings of the 22nd annual international symposium on Computer architecture
A look at several memory management units, TLB-refill mechanisms, and page table organizations
Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
IP routing protocols: RIP, OSPF, BGP, PNNI and Cisco routing protocols
IP routing protocols: RIP, OSPF, BGP, PNNI and Cisco routing protocols
Low power design challenges for the decade (invited talk)
Proceedings of the 2001 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
Exploring the Design Space of Future CMPs
Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques
NpBench: A Benchmark Suite for Control plane and Data plane Applications for Network Processors
ICCD '03 Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Design
Mitigating Amdahl's Law through EPI Throttling
Proceedings of the 32nd annual international symposium on Computer Architecture
Computational Aspects of VLSI
Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessors
Computer
A survey of research and practices of Network-on-chip
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Thousand core chips: a technology perspective
Proceedings of the 44th annual Design Automation Conference
Dark silicon and the end of multicore scaling
Proceedings of the 38th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
A Canonical Multicore Architecture for Network Routers
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM/IEEE Seventh Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems
Is dark silicon useful?: harnessing the four horsemen of the coming dark silicon apocalypse
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Design Automation Conference
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This paper introduces a new architectural technique called asymmetric scaling on heterogeneous multi-core network processor architectures to mitigate the problem of dark silicon in future process technologies. In asymmetric scaling, the number of low power cores is increased at a higher rate than the number of high performance cores over process generations. Using an analytical model we show that coupled with fixed voltage-frequency scaling, asymmetric scaling can maintain the power density of the chip at the same level for several process generations, while increasing computational capabilities according to Dennardian scaling. Asymmetric scaling aligns nicely with the application characteristics on a network packet processor. To illustrate the concept, we discuss the Layerscape network processor architecture that incorporates a general purpose layer of high performance cores with an accelerated packet processing layer of low power cores. We discuss several techniques that can be applied to reduce the power density of low power cores. Using a representative packet forwarding workload, we show that shallow-pipeline, dual-issue, in-order cores with appropriate hardware acceleration and limited on-chip memory are a good choice for the low power processor layer.