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There’s No Such Thing as a General-purpose Processor: And the belief in such a device is harmful

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David ChisnallAuthors Info & Claims

Queue, Volume 12, Issue 10

Pages 20 - 25

https://doi.org/10.1145/2685690.2687011

Published: 08 October 2014 Publication History

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Abstract

There is an increasing trend in computer architecture to categorize processors and accelerators as "general purpose." Of the papers published at this year’s International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2014), nine out of 45 explicitly referred to general-purpose processors; one additionally referred to general-purpose FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), and another referred to general-purpose MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) supercomputers, stretching the definition to the breaking point. This article presents the argument that there is no such thing as a truly general-purpose processor and that the belief in such a device is harmful.

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Cited By

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Chisnall D(2024)How to Design an ISACommunications of the ACM10.1145/364053867:5(60-66)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3640538
Chisnall D(2024)How to Design an ISAQueue10.1145/363944521:6(27-46)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3639445
Karpowicz MArabas PNiewiadomska-Szynkiewicz E(2018)Design and implementation of energy-aware application-specific CPU frequency governors for the heterogeneous distributed computing systemsFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2016.05.01178(302-315)Online publication date: Jan-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2016.05.011
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Index Terms

There’s No Such Thing as a General-purpose Processor: And the belief in such a device is harmful
1. Applied computing
  1. Physical sciences and engineering
    1. Electronics

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Published In

Queue Volume 12, Issue 10

Development

October 2014

24 pages

ISSN:1542-7730

EISSN:1542-7749

DOI:10.1145/2685690

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Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 October 2014

Published in QUEUE Volume 12, Issue 10

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Chisnall D(2024)How to Design an ISACommunications of the ACM10.1145/364053867:5(60-66)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3640538
Chisnall D(2024)How to Design an ISAQueue10.1145/363944521:6(27-46)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3639445
Karpowicz MArabas PNiewiadomska-Szynkiewicz E(2018)Design and implementation of energy-aware application-specific CPU frequency governors for the heterogeneous distributed computing systemsFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2016.05.01178(302-315)Online publication date: Jan-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2016.05.011
Barbalace AIliopoulos ARauchfuss HBrasche G(2017)It's Time to Think About an Operating System for Near Data Processing ArchitecturesProceedings of the 16th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems10.1145/3102980.3102990(56-61)Online publication date: 7-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3102980.3102990

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