Composable Lightweight Processors

Modern Chip MultiProcessors (CMPs) are designed to exploit both Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP) within processors and Thread-Level Parallelism (TLP) within and across processors. However, the number of processors and the granularity of each processor are fixed at design time. This paper evaluates a flexible architectural approach, called Composable Lightweight Processors (or CLPs), that allows simple, low-power cores to be aggregated together dynamically, forming larger, more powerful single-threaded processors without changing the application binary.