The Price of Performance

  • Authors:
  • Luiz André Barroso

  • Affiliations:
  • Google

  • Venue:
  • Queue - Multiprocessors
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In the late 1990s, our research group at DEC was one of a growing number of teams advocating the CMP (chip multiprocessor) as an alternative to highly complex single-threaded CPUs. We were designing the Piranha system,1 which was a radical point in the CMP design space in that we used very simple cores (similar to the early RISC designs of the late ’80s) to provide a higher level of thread-level parallelism. Our main goal was to achieve the best commercial workload performance for a given silicon budget.