This paper provides an introductory overview of the Cell multiprocessor. Cell represents a revolutionary extension of conventional microprocessor architecture and organization. The paper discusses the history of the project, the program objectives and challenges, the disign concept, the architecture and programming models, and the implementation.

Introduction to the cell multiprocessor

Power density continues to increase exponentially with each new technology generation, posing a major challenge for thermal management in modern processors. Much past work has examined microarchitectural policies for reducing total chip power, but these techniques alone are insufficient if not aimed at mitigating individual hotspots. The industry's current trend has been toward multicore architectures, which provide additional opportunities for dynamic thermal management. This paper explores various thermal management techniques that exploit the distributed nature of multicore processors. We classify these techniques in terms of core throttling policy, whether that policy is applied locally to a core or to the processor as a whole, and process migration policies. We use Turandot and a HotSpot-based thermal simulator to simulate a variety of workloads under thermal duress on a 4-core PowerPCTMprocessor. Using benchmarks from the SPEC 2000 suite we characterize workloads in terms of instruction throughput as well as their effective duty cycles. Among a variety of options we find that distributed controltheoretic DVFS alone improves throughput by 2.5X under our test conditions. Our final design involves a PI-based core thermal controller and an outer control loop to decide process migrations. This policy avoids all thermal emergencies and yields an average of 2.6X speedup over the baseline across all workloads.

http://bnrg.eecs.berkeley.edu/~randy/Courses/CS294.F07/5.1.pdf

Techniques for Multicore Thermal Management: Classification and New Exploration

This paper examines the area, power, performance, and design issues for the on-chip interconnects on a chip multiprocessor, attempting to present a comprehensive view of a class of interconnect architectures. It shows that the design choices for the interconnect have significant effect on the rest of the chip, potentially consuming a significant fraction of the real estate and power budget. This research shows that designs that treat interconnect as an entity that can be independently architected and optimized would not arrive at the best multi-core design. Several examples are presented showing the need for careful co-design. For instance, increasing interconnect bandwidth requires area that then constrains the number of cores or cache sizes, and does not necessarily increase performance. Also, shared level-2 caches become significantly less attractive when the overhead of the resulting crossbar is accounted for. A hierarchical bus structure is examined which negates some of the performance costs of the assumed base-line architecture.

/pdf/interconnections-in-multi-core-architectures-understanding-3fcytq8fwi.pdf

Interconnections in Multi-Core Architectures: Understanding Mechanisms, Overheads and Scaling

This paper describes the implementation of the IBM POWER5TM chip, a two-way simultaneous multithreaded dual-core chip, and systems based on it. With a key goal of maintaining both binary and structural compatibility with POWER4TM systems, the POWER5 microprocessor allows system scalability to 64 physical processors. A POWER5 system allows both single-threaded and multithreaded execution modes. In single-threaded execution mode, a POWER5 system allows for higher performance than its predecessor POWER4 system at equivalent frequencies. In multithreaded execution mode, the POWER5 microprocessor implements dynamic resource balancing to ensure that each thread receives its fair share of system resources. Additionally, software-settable thread priority is enforced by the POWER5 hardware. To conserve power, the POWER5 chip implements dynamic power management that allows reduced power consumption without affecting performance.

/pdf/power5-system-microarchitecture-4xus9opb40.pdf

POWER5 System microarchitecture

In the last few years, power dissipation has become an important design constraint, on par with performance, in the design of new computer systems. Whereas in the past, the primary job of the computer architect was to translate improvements in operating frequency and transistor count into performance, now power efficiency must be taken into account at every step of the design process. While for some time, architects have been successful in delivering 40% to 50% annual improvement in processor performance, costs that were previously brushed aside eventually caught up. The most critical of these costs is the inexorable increase in power dissipation and power density in processors. Power dissipation issues have catalyzed new topic areas in computer architecture, resulting in a substantial body of work on more power-efficient architectures. Power dissipation coupled with diminishing performance gains, was also the main cause for the switch from single-core to multi-core architectures and slowdown in frequency increase. This book aims to document some of the most important architectural techniques that were invented, proposed, and applied to reduce both dynamic power and static power dissipation in processors and memory hierarchies. A significant number of techniques have been proposed for a wide range of situations and this book synthesizes those techniques by focusing on their common characteristics. Table of Contents: Introduction / Modeling, Simulation, and Measurement / Using Voltage and Frequency Adjustments to Manage Dynamic Power / Optimizing Capacitance and Switching Activity to Reduce Dynamic Power / Managing Static (Leakage) Power / Conclusions

Computer Architecture Techniques for Power-Efficiency

POWER5 offers significantly increased performance over previous POWER designs by incorporating simultaneous multithreading, an enhanced memory subsystem, and extensive RAS and power management support. The 276M transistor processor is implemented in 130nm silicon-on-insulator technology with 8-level of Cu metallization and operates at >1.5 GHz.

Design and implementation of the POWER5 microprocessor

A symmetric multi-processing (SMP) processor includes a primary interconnect trunk for communication of information between multiple compute elements situated along the primary interconnect trunk The processor also includes a secondary interconnected trunk that may be oriented perpendicular with respect to the primary interconnect trunk The processor distributes data on-ramps and data off-ramps across the data lanes of a data trunk of the primary interconnect trunk to enable communication with compute elements and other structures both on-chip and off-chip

Gary Alan Gorman

Papers

Design and implementation of the POWER5 microprocessor

Information Handling System Including A Multiple Compute Element Processor With Distributed Data On-Ramp Data-Off Ramp Topology