Chip Multithreading: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Chip multi-threaded (CMT) processors provide support for many simultaneous hardware threads of execution in various ways, including simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and chip multiprocessing (CMP). CMT processors are especially suited to server workloads, which generally have high levels of thread-level parallelism (TLP). In this paper, we describe the evolution of CMT chips in industry and highlight the pervasiveness of CMT designs in upcoming general-purpose processors. The CMT design space accommodates a range of designs between the extremes represented by the SMT and CMP designs and a variety of attractive design options are currently unexplored. Though there has been extensive research on utilizing multiple hardware threads to speed up single-threaded applications via speculative parallelization, there are many challenges in designing CMT processors, even when sufficient TLP is present. This paper describes some of these challenges including, hot sets, hot banks, speculative prefetching strategies, request prioritization and off-chip bandwidth reduction.