Energy efficient speculative threads: Dynamic thread allocation in same-ISA heterogeneous multicore systems

Abstract

Thread-level parallelism at the chip level is critical in overcoming some of the challenges that have been ushered in through the advent of modern multicore processors (CMP). Extracting speculatively parallel threads from sequential applications and executing these threads on multicore processors is a promising technique to speed up these applications on multicore systems. However, the potential degradation in energy efficiency associated is an important factor that hinders the deployment of this technique. For multicore systems that integrate same-ISA heterogeneous cores, it is possible to judiciously allocate speculative threads to achieve energy-efficient performance improvement.