The Cost of Uncore in Throughput-Oriented Many-Core Processors

Achieving performance through traditional techniques such as extracting more instruction level parallelism or increasing clock frequencies are losing their effectiveness due to the power wall. Multi-core processors have been put forth as a more power-performance efficient means of continuing performance scaling while coping with the realities of a power-limited design. Extrapolating the increase in the number of cores leads one to "Many-core" systems, potentially containing hundreds of cores. The multi-/many-core approach is no panacea, however. As the number of cores increases, the overall system will need to provide more cache resources to feed all of these cores, and an ever increasingly complex interconnection network to tie all of these cores together.