Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine

1. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
Chip Multiprocessing
and the Cell Broadband Engine
Michael Gschwind
ACM Computing Frontiers 2006

2. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
2 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Computer Architecture at the turn of the millenium
ƒ “The end of architecture” was being proclaimed
– Frequency scaling as performance driver
– State of the art microprocessors
•multiple instruction issue
•out of order architecture
•register renaming
•deep pipelines
ƒ Little or no focus on compilers
– Questions about the need for compiler research
ƒ Academic papers focused on microarchitecture tweaks

3. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
3 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
The age of frequency scaling
SCALING:
Voltage: V/α
Oxide: tox /α
Wire width: W/α
Gate width: L/α
Diffusion: xd /α
Substrate: α * NA
RESULTS:
Higher Density: ~α2
Higher Speed: ~α
Power/ckt: ~1/α2
Power Density:
~Constant
p substrate, doping α*NA
Scaled Device
L/α
xd/α
GATE
n+
source
n+
drain
WIRING
Voltage, V / α
W/α
tox/α
Source: Dennard et al., JSSC 1974.
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
7
10
13
16
19
22
25
28
31
34
37
Total FO4 Per Stage
Performance
bips
deeper pipeline

4. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
4 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Frequency scaling
ƒ A trusted standby
– Frequency as the tide that raises all boats
– Increased performance across all applications
– Kept the industry going for a decade
ƒ Massive investment to keep going
– Equipment cost
– Power increase
– Manufacturing variability
– New materials

5. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
5 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
… but reality was closing in!
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
7
10
13
16
19
22
25
28
31
34
37
Total FO4 Per Stage
Relative
to
Optimal
FO4
bips
bips^3/W
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
10
100
1000
0.01
0.1
1
Active Power
Leakage Power

6. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
6 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Power crisis
0.1
1
10
100
1000
0.01
0.1
1
gate length Lgate (µm)
classic scaling
Tox(Å)
Vdd
Vt
ƒ The power crisis is not
“natural”
– Created by deviating from
ideal scaling theory
– Vdd and Vt not scaled by α
• additional performance with
increased voltage
ƒ Laws of physics
– Pchip = ntransistors * Ptransistor
ƒ Marginal performance gain
per transistor low
– significant power increase
– decreased power/performance
efficiency

7. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
7 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
The power inefficiency of deep pipelining
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
7
10
13
16
19
22
25
28
31
34
37
Total FO4 Per Stage
Relative
to
Optimal
FO4
bips
bips^3/W
ƒ Deep pipelining increases number of latches and switching rate
⇒ power increases with at least f2
ƒ Latch insertion delay limits gains of pipelining
Power-performance optimal Performance optimal
Source: Srinivasan et al., MICRO 2002
deeper pipeline

8. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
8 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Hitting the memory wall
ƒ Latency gap
– Memory speedup lags behind
processor speedup
– limits ILP
ƒ Chip I/O bandwidth gap
– Less bandwidth per MIPS
ƒ Latency gap as application
bandwidth gap
– Typically (much) less than
chip I/O bandwidth
-60
-40
-20
0
20
40
60
80
100
1990 2003
normalized
MFLOPS Memory latency
Source: McKee, Computing Frontiers 2004
Source: Burger et al., ISCA 1996
usable bandwidth avg. request size
roundtrip latency
no. of inflight
requests

9. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
9 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Our Y2K challenge
ƒ 10× performance of desktop systems
ƒ 1 TeraFlop / second with a four-node configuration
ƒ 1 Byte bandwidth per 1 Flop
– “golden rule for balanced supercomputer design”
ƒ scalable design across a range of design points
ƒ mass-produced and low cost

10. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
10 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Cell Design Goals
ƒ Provide the platform for the future of computing
– 10× performance of desktop systems shipping in 2005
ƒ Computing density as main challenge
–Dramatically increase performance per X
• X = Area, Power, Volume, Cost,…
ƒ Single core designs offer diminishing returns on
investment
– In power, area, design complexity and verification cost

11. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
11 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Necessity as the mother of invention
ƒ Increase power-performance efficiency
–Simple designs are more efficient in terms of power and area
ƒ Increase memory subsystem efficiency
–Increasing data transaction size
–Increase number of concurrently outstanding transactions
⇒ Exploit larger fraction of chip I/O bandwidth
ƒ Use CMOS density scaling
–Exploit density instead of frequency scaling to deliver increased
aggregate performance
ƒ Use compilers to extract parallelism from application
–Exploit application parallelism to translate aggregate
performance to application performance

12. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
12 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Exploit application-level parallelism
ƒ Data-level parallelism
– SIMD parallelism improves performance with little overhead
ƒ Thread-level parallelism
– Exploit application threads with multi-core design approach
ƒ Memory-level parallelism
– Improve memory access efficiency by increasing number of
parallel memory transactions
ƒ Compute-transfer parallelism
– Transfer data in parallel to execution by exploiting application
knowledge

13. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
13 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Concept phase ideas
Chip
Multiprocessor
efficient use of
memory interface
large architected
register set
high frequency
and low power!
reverse Vdd
scaling for low
power
modular design
design reuse
control cost of
coherency

14. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
14 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Cell Architecture
ƒ Heterogeneous multi-
core system
architecture
– Power Processor
Element for control tasks
– Synergistic Processor
Elements for data-
intensive processing
ƒ Synergistic Processor
Element (SPE)
consists of
– Synergistic Processor
Unit (SPU)
– Synergistic Memory Flow
Control (SMF)
16B/cycle (2x)
16B/cycle
BIC
FlexIOTM
MIC
Dual
XDRTM
16B/cycle
EIB (up to 96B/cycle)
16B/cycle
64-bit Power Architecture with VMX
PPE
SPE
LS
SXU
SPU
SMF
PXU
L1
PPU
16B/cycle
L2
32B/cycle
LS
SXU
SPU
SMF
LS
SXU
SPU
SMF
LS
SXU
SPU
SMF
LS
SXU
SPU
SMF
LS
SXU
SPU
SMF
LS
SXU
SPU
SMF
LS
SXU
SPU
SMF

15. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
15 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Shifting the Balance of Power with Cell Broadband Engine
ƒ Data processor instead of control system
– Control-centric code stable over time
– Big growth in data processing needs
• Modeling
• Games
• Digital media
• Scientific applications
ƒ Today’s architectures are built on a 40 year old data model
– Efficiency as defined in 1964
– Big overhead per data operation
– Parallelism added as an after-thought

16. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
16 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Powering Cell – the Synergistic Processor Unit
VRF
VRF
PERM
PERM LSU
LSU
V
V F
F P
P U
U V
V F
F X
X U
U
Local Store
Local Store
Single Port
Single Port
SRAM
SRAM
Issue /
Issue /
Branch
Branch
Fetch
ILB
16B x 2
2 instructions
16B x 3 x 2
64B
64B
16B
16B
128B
128B
Source: Gschwind et al., Hot Chips 17, 2005
SMF
SMF

17. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
17 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Density Computing in SPEs
ƒ Today, execution units only fraction of core area and power
– Bigger fraction goes to other functions
• Address translation and privilege levels
• Instruction reordering
• Register renaming
• Cache hierarchy
ƒ Cell changes this ratio to increase performance per area and
power
– Architectural focus on data processing
• Wide datapaths
• More and wide architectural registers
• Data privatization and single level processor-local store
• All code executes in a single (user) privilege level
• Static scheduling

18. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
18 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Streamlined Architecture
ƒ Architectural focus on simplicity
– Aids achievable operating frequency
– Optimize circuits for common performance case
– Compiler aids in layering traditional hardware functions
– Leverage 20 years of architecture research
ƒ Focus on statically scheduled data parallelism
– Focus on data parallel instructions
• No separate scalar execution units
• Scalar operations mapped onto data parallel dataflow
– Exploit wide data paths
• data processing
• instruction fetch
– Address impediments to static scheduling
• Large register set
• Reduce latencies by eliminating non-essential functionality

19. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
19 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
SPE Highlights
ƒ RISC organization
– 32 bit fixed instructions
– Load/store architecture
– Unified register file
ƒ User-mode architecture
– No page translation within SPU
ƒ SIMD dataflow
– Broad set of operations (8, 16, 32, 64 Bit)
– Graphics SP-Float
– IEEE DP-Float
ƒ 256KB Local Store
– Combined I & D
ƒ DMA block transfer
– using Power Architecture memory
translation
LS
LS
LS
LS
GPR
FXU ODD
FXU EVN
SFP
DP
CONTROL
CHANNEL
DMA SMM
ATO
SBI
RTB
BE
B
FWD
14.5mm2 (90nm SOI)
Source: Kahle, Spring Processor Forum 2005

20. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
20 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
data
parallel
select
static
prediction
simpler
μarch
sequential
fetch
local
store
high
frequency
shorter
pipeline
large
basic
blocks
determ.
latency
large
register
file
instruction
bundling
DLP
wide
data
paths
compute
density
Synergistic Processing
single
port
static
scheduling
scalar
layering
ILP
opt.

21. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
21 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Efficient data-sharing between scalar and SIMD processing
ƒ Legacy architectures separate scalar and SIMD
processing
– Data sharing between SIMD and scalar processing units
expensive
• Transfer penalty between register files
– Defeats data-parallel performance improvement in many
scenarios
ƒ Unified register file facilitates data sharing for
efficient exploitation of data parallelism
– Allow exploitation of data parallelism without data transfer
penalty
• Data-parallelism always an improvement

22. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
22 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
SPU PIPELINE FRONT END
SPU PIPELINE BACK END
Branch Instruction
Load/Store Instruction
IF Instruction Fetch
IB Instruction Buffer
ID Instruction Decode
IS Instruction Issue
RF Register File Access
EX Execution
WB Write Back
Floating Point Instruction
Permute Instruction
EX1 EX2 EX3 EX4
EX1 EX2 EX3 EX4 EX5 EX6
EX1 EX2 WB
WB
RF1 RF2
WB
Fixed Point Instruction
EX1 EX2 EX3 EX4 EX5 EX6 WB
IF1 IF2 IF3 IF4 IF5 IB1 IB2 ID1 ID2 ID3 IS1 IS2
SPU Pipeline

23. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
23 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Permute Unit
Load-Store Unit
Floating-Point Unit
Fixed-Point Unit
Branch Unit
Channel Unit
Result Forwarding and Staging
Register File
Local Store
(256kB)
Single Port SRAM
128B Read 128B Write
DMA Unit
Instruction Issue Unit / Instruction Line Buffer
8 Byte/Cycle 16 Byte/Cycle 128 Byte/Cycle
64 Byte/Cycle
On-Chip Coherent Bus
SPE Block Diagram

24. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
24 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Synergistic Memory Flow Control
Data Bus
Snoop Bus
Control Bus
Translate Ld/St
MMIO
DMA Engine DMA
Queue
RMT
MMU
Atomic
Facility
Bus I/F Control
LS
SXU
SPU
MMIO
SPE
SMF
ƒ SMF implements memory
management and mapping
ƒ SMF operates in parallel to SPU
– Independent compute and transfer
– Command interface from SPU
• DMA queue decouples SMF & SPU
• MMIO-interface for remote nodes
ƒ Block transfer between system
memory and local store
ƒ SPE programs reference system
memory using user-level
effective address space
– Ease of data sharing
– Local store to local store transfers
– Protection

25. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
25 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Synergistic Memory Flow Control
ƒ Bus Interface
– Up to 16 outstanding DMA
requests
– Requests up to 16KByte
– Token-based Bus Access
Management
Source: Clark et al., Hot Chips 17, 2005
ƒ Element Interconnect Bus
– Four 16 byte data rings
– Multiple concurrent transfers
– 96B/cycle peak bandwidth
– Over 100 outstanding requests
– 200+ GByte/s @ 3.2+ GHz
16B 16B 16B 16B
Data Arb
16B 16B 16B 16B
16B 16B
16B 16B
16B 16B
16B 16B
16B
16B
16B
16B
16B
16B
16B
16B
SPE0 SPE2 SPE4 SPE6
SPE7
SPE5
SPE3
SPE1
MIC
PPE
BIF/IOIF0
IOIF1

26. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
26 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Memory efficiency as key to application performance
ƒ Greatest challenge in translating peak into app performance
– Peak Flops useless without way to feed data
ƒ Cache miss provides too little data too late
– Inefficient for streaming / bulk data processing
– Initiates transfer when transfer results are already needed
– Application-controlled data fetch avoids not-on-time data delivery
ƒ SMF is a better way to look at an old problem
– Fetch data blocks based on algorithm
– Blocks reflect application data structures

27. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
27 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Traditional memory usage
ƒ Long latency memory access operations exposed
ƒ Cannot overlap 500+ cycles with computation
ƒ Memory access latency severely impacts application performance
computation mem protocol mem idle mem contention

28. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
28 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Exploiting memory-level parallelism
ƒ Reduce performance impact of memory accesses with concurrent
access
ƒ Carefully scheduled memory accesses in numeric code
ƒ Out-of-order execution increases chance to discover more
concurrent accesses
– Overlapping 500 cycle latency with computation using OoO illusory
ƒ Bandwidth limited by queue size and roundtrip latency

29. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
29 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Exploiting MLP with Chip Multiprocessing
ƒ More threads Î more memory level parallelism
– overlap accesses from multiple cores

30. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
30 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
A new form of parallelism: CTP
ƒ Compute-transfer parallelism
– Concurrent execution of compute and transfer increases
efficiency
• Avoid costly and unnecessary serialization
– Application thread has two threads of control
• SPU Î computation thread
• SMF Î transfer thread
ƒ Optimize memory access and data transfer at the
application level
– Exploit programmer and application knowledge about
data access patterns

31. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
31 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Memory access in Cell with MLP and CTP
ƒ Super-linear performance gains observed
– decouple data fetch and use

32. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
32 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
multi
core
many
outstanding
transfers
sequential
fetch
high
throughput
timely
data
delivery
shared
I & D
reduce
miss
complexity
parallel
compute &
transfer
improved
code gen
decouple
fetch and
access
explicit
data
transfer
storage
density
Synergistic Memory Management
single
port
application
control
reduced
coherence
cost
low
latency
access
block
fetch
deeper
fetch
queue
local
store

33. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
33 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Cell BE Implementation Characteristics
ƒ 241M transistors
ƒ 235mm2
ƒ Design operates across wide
frequency range
– Optimize for power & yield
ƒ > 200 GFlops (SP) @3.2GHz
ƒ > 20 GFlops (DP) @3.2GHz
ƒ Up to 25.6 GB/s memory bandwidth
ƒ Up to 75 GB/s I/O bandwidth
ƒ 100+ simultaneous bus
transactions
– 16+8 entry DMA queue per SPE
Relative
Frequency Increase vs. Power Consumption
Voltage
Source: Kahle, Spring Processor Forum 2005

34. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
34 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Cell Broadband Engine

35. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
35 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
System configurations
Cell BE
Processor
XDR™
XDR™
IOIF
BIF
Cell BE
Processor
XDR™
XDR™
IOIF
Cell
BE
Processor
XDR
™
XDR
™
IOIF
BIF
Cell
BE
Processor
XDR
™
XDR
™
IOIF
switch
Cell BE
Processor
XDR™ XDR™
IOIF BIF
Cell BE
Processor
XDR™ XDR™
IOIF
Cell BE
Processor
XDR™ XDR™
IOIF0 IOIF1
ƒ Game console systems
ƒ Blades
ƒ HDTV
ƒ Home media servers
ƒ Supercomputers
Cell
Design

36. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
36 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Compiling for the Cell Broadband Engine
ƒ The lesson of “RISC computing”
– Architecture provides fast, streamlined primitives to compiler
– Compiler uses primitives to implement higher-level idioms
– If the compiler can’t target it Î do not include in architecture
ƒ Compiler focus throughout project
– Prototype compiler soon after first proposal
– Cell compiler team has made significant advances in
• Automatic SIMD code generation
• Automatic parallelization
• Data privatization
Programmability
Programmer
Productivity
Raw Hardware
Performance
Cell
Design

37. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
37 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Single source automatic parallelization
ƒ Single source compiler
– Address legacy code and programmer productivity
– Partition a single source program into SPE and PPE functions
ƒ Automatic parallelization
– Across multiple threads
– Vectorization to exploit SIMD units
ƒ Compiler managed local store
– Data and code blocking and tiling
– “Software cache” managed by compiler
ƒ Range of programmer input
– Fully automatic
– Programmer-guided
• pragmas, intrinsics, OpenMP directives
ƒ Prototype developed in IBM Research

38. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
38 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Compiler-driven performance
ƒ Code partitioning
– Thread-level parallelism
– Handle local store size
– “Outlining” into SPE overlays
ƒ Data partitioning
– Data access sequencing
– Double buffering
– “Software cache”
ƒ Data parallelization
– SIMD vectorization
– Handling of data with
.unknown alignment
Source: Eichenberger et al., PACT 2005

39. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
39 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Raising the bar with parallelism…
ƒ Data-parallelism and static ILP in both core types
– Results in low overhead per operation
ƒ Multithreaded programming is key to great Cell BE performance
– Exploit application parallelism with 9 cores
– Regardless of whether code exploits DLP & ILP
– Challenge regardless of homogeneity/heterogeneity
ƒ Leverage parallelism between data processing and data transfer
– A new level of parallelism exploiting bulk data transfer
– Simultaneous processing on SPUs and data transfer on SMFs
– Offers superlinear gains beyond MIPS-scaling

40. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
40 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
… while understanding the trade-offs
ƒ Uniprocessor efficiency is actually low
– Gelsinger’s Law captures historic (performance) efficiency
• 1.4x performance for 2x transistors
– Marginal uni-processor (performance) efficiency is 40% (or lower!)
• And power efficiency is even worse
ƒ The “true” bar is marginal uniprocessor efficiency
– A multiprocessor “only” has to beat a uniprocessor to be the better
solution
– Many low-hanging fruit to be picked in multithreading applications
• Embarrassing application parallelism which has not been exploited

41. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
41 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Cell: a Synergistic System Architecture
ƒ Cell is not a collection of different processors, but a synergistic whole
– Operation paradigms, data formats and semantics consistent
– Share address translation and memory protection model
ƒ SPE optimized for efficient data processing
– SPEs share Cell system functions provided by Power Architecture
– SMF implements interface to memory
• Copy in/copy out to local storage
ƒ Power Architecture provides system functions
– Virtualization
– Address translation and protection
– External exception handling
ƒ Element Interconnect Bus integrates system as data transport hub

42. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
42 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
A new wave of innovation
ƒ CMPs everywhere
– same ISA CMPs
– different ISA CMPs
– homogeneous CMP
– heterogeneous CMP
– thread-rich CMPs
– GPUs as compute engine
ƒ Compilers and software
must and will follow…
ƒ Novel systems
– Power4
– BOA
– Piranha
– Cyclops
– Niagara
– BlueGene
– Power5
– Xbox360
– Cell BE

43. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
43 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
Conclusion
ƒ Established performance drivers are running out of steam
ƒ Need new approach to build high performance system
– Application and system-centric optimization
– Chip multiprocessing
– Understand and manage memory access
– Need compilers to orchestrate data and instruction flow
ƒ Need new push on understanding workload behavior
ƒ Need renewed focus on compilation technology
ƒ An exciting journey is ahead of us!

44. Cell Broadband Engine
© 2006 IBM Corporation
44 Chip Multiprocessing and the Cell Broadband Engine
M. Gschwind, Computing Frontiers 2006
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