Abstract
Advances in IC processing allow for more microprocessor design
options. The increasing gate density and cost of wires in advanced
integrated circuit technologies require that we look for new ways to
use their capabilities effectively. This paper shows that in advanced
technologies it is possible to implement a single-chip multiprocessor
in the same area as a wide issue superscalar processor. We find
that for applications with little parallelism the performance of the
two microarchitectures is comparable. For applications with large
amounts of parallelism at both the fine and coarse grained levels,
the multiprocessor microarchitecture outperforms the superscalar
architecture by a significant margin. Single-chip multiprocessor
architectures have the advantage in that they offer localized implementation
of a high-clock rate processor for inherently sequential
applications and low latency interprocessor communication for parallel
applications.
