Isolation in Commodity Multicore Processors

Technology scaling and power trends have led to the widespread emergence of Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) as the predominant hardware paradigm. 1 Multiple cores are being integrated on a single chip and made available for general purpose computing. Intel and AMD manufacture dual core processors and, more recently, quad-core processors. From a system viewpoint, CMPs provide higher levels of integration, typically including multiple processing cores, caches, memory controllers, and even some I/O processing - all in a single socket. The Sun Niagara processor, for example, includes eight cores, a shared second-level cache, and integrated memory controllers and I/O interfaces. The IBM Power5 dual-core processor has an on-chip memory controller.