Chip Multiprocessors for Server Workloads

The authors stand on the cusp of the giga-scale era of chip integration. Technological advancements in semiconductor fabrication yield ever-smaller and faster devices, enabling billion-transistor chips with multi-gigahertz clock frequencies. To utilize the abundant transistors on chip, modern processors pack an exponentially increasing number of cores on chip, multi-megabyte caches, and large interconnects to facilitate intra-chip data transfers. However, the growing on-chip resources do not directly translate into a commensurate increase in performance. Rather, they come at the cost of increased on-chip data access latency, while thermal considerations and pin constraints limit the parallelism that a multicore chip can support.