Title :
Understanding the energy efficiency of simultaneous multithreading
Author :
Li, Yingmin ; Brooks, David ; Hu, Zhigang ; Skadron, Kevin ; Bose, Pradip
Abstract :
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) has proven to be an effective method of increasing the performance of microprocessors by extracting additional instruction-level parallelism from multiple threads. In current microprocessor designs, power-efficiency is of critical importance, and we present modeling extensions to an architectural simulator to allow us to study the power-performance efficiency of SMT. After a thorough design space exploration we find that SMT can provide a performance speedup of nearly 20% for a wide range of applications with a power overhead of roughly 24%. Thus, SMT can provide a substantial benefit for energy-efficiency metrics such as ED2. We also explore the underlying reasons for the power uplift, analyze the impact of leakage-sensitive process technologies, and discuss our model validation strategy.
Keywords :
low-power electronics; microprocessor chips; multi-threading; parallel architectures; additional instruction-level parallelism; design space exploration; energy efficiency; leakage-sensitive process technologies; microarchitectural paradigm; microprocessor performance; model validation strategy; multiple threads; power uplift; power-efficiency; power-performance modeling toolkit; simultaneous multithreading; Computer science; Energy efficiency; Microarchitecture; Microprocessors; Multithreading; Parallel processing; Permission; Space exploration; Surface-mount technology; Yarn;
Conference_Titel :
Low Power Electronics and Design, 2004. ISLPED '04. Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on
Print_ISBN :
1-58113-929-2
DOI :
10.1109/LPE.2004.1349305
