Understanding the energy efficiency of simultaneous multithreading
Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Low power electronics and …, 2004•dl.acm.org
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) has proven to be an effective method of increasing the
performance of microprocessors by extracting additional instruction-level parallelism from
multiple threads. In current microprocessor designs, power-efficiency is of critical
importance, and we present modeling extensions to an architectural simulator to allow us to
study the power-performance efficiency of SMT. After a thorough design space exploration
we find that SMT can provide a performance speedup of nearly 20% for a wide range of …
performance of microprocessors by extracting additional instruction-level parallelism from
multiple threads. In current microprocessor designs, power-efficiency is of critical
importance, and we present modeling extensions to an architectural simulator to allow us to
study the power-performance efficiency of SMT. After a thorough design space exploration
we find that SMT can provide a performance speedup of nearly 20% for a wide range of …
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) has proven to be an effective method of increasing the performance of microprocessors by extracting additional instruction-level parallelism from multiple threads. In current microprocessor designs, power-efficiency is of critical importance, and we present modeling extensions to an architectural simulator to allow us to study the power-performance efficiency of SMT. After a thorough design space exploration we find that SMT can provide a performance speedup of nearly 20% for a wide range of applications with a power overhead of roughly 24%. Thus, SMT can provide a substantial benefit for energy-efficiency metrics such as ED2. We also explore the underlying reasons for the power uplift, analyze the impact of leakage-sensitive process technologies, and discuss our model validation strategy.