Under 100-cycle thread migration latency in a single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core processor

Abstract

This article consists of a single slide from the authors' conference presentation. Single-ISA Heterogeneous Multi-core: General purpose cores with different microarchitectures, tuned for different energy/performance points. Performance and energy of a program can be optimized by migrating among the core types as program characteristics change. Prior research has shown as much as a 50% improvement in energy when migrating every 1,000 cycles versus every 10,000 cycles. Such fine-grained thread migration requires very low migration overhead. We propose hardware support for fast thread migration. To migrate a thread, committed register values and the program counter must be moved from the source core to the destination core.