Area and system clock effects on SMT/CMP processors

Abstract

Two approaches to high throughput processors are chip multiprocessing (CMP) and simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). CMP increases layout efficiency, which allows more functional units and a faster clock rate. However, CMP suffers from hardware partitioning of functional resources. SMT increases functional unit utilization by issuing instructions simultaneously from multiple threads. However, a wide-issue SMT suffers from layout and technology implementation problems. We use silicon resources as our basis for comparison and find that area and system clock have a large effect on the optimal SMT/CCMP design trade. We show the area overhead of SMT on each processor and how it scales with the width of the processor pipeline and the number of SMT threads. The wide issue SMT delivers the highest single-thread performance with improved multi-thread throughput. However multiple smaller cores deliver the highest throughput.