multi-core microprocessors are here

By Richard McDougall and James Lauden
From 2006 usenix

From Thoughts about Software Scaling:

On a multi-threaded microprocessor, each hardware thread appears to the operating system as an individual processor. The ability of system and application software to exploit multiple processors or threads simultaneously is becoming more important than ever. As CMT hardware progresses, software is required to scale accordingly to fully exploit the parallelism of the chip.

Thus, bringing this degree of parallelism down to the chip level represents a significant change to the way we think about scaling. Since the cost of a CMT system is close to that of recent low-end uniprocessor systems, it's inevitable that even the cheapest desktops and servers will be highly threaded. Techniques used to scale application and system software on large enterprise-level SMP systems will now frequently be leveraged to provide scalability even for single-chip systems. We need to consider the effects of the change in the degree of scaling at the low end on the way we design applications, on which operating system we choose, and on the techniques we use to deploy applications.

Resources

multi-core microprocessors are here

multi-core microprocessors are here

Labels