Exploring Energy/Performance Tradeoffs in Shared Memory MPSoCs: Snoop-Based Cache Coherence vs. Software Solutions

  • Authors:
  • Mirko Loghi;Massimo Poncino

  • Affiliations:
  • Università di Verona, Italy;Politecnico di Torino, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Shared memory is a common interprocessor communication paradigm for single-chip multi-processor platforms. Snoop-based cache coherence is a very successful technique that provides a clean shared-memory programming abstraction in general-purpose chip multi-processors, but there is no consensus on its usage in resource-constrained multiprocessor systems on chips (MPSoCs) for embedded applications. This work aims at providing a comparative energy and performance analysis of cache coherence support schemes in MPSoCs. Thanks to the use of a complete multi-processor simulation platform, which relies on accurate technology-homogeneous power models, we were able to explore different cache-coherent shared-memory communication schemes for a number of cache configurations and workloads.