Title :
Rock: A High-Performance Sparc CMT Processor
Author :
Chaudhry, Shailender ; Cypher, Robert ; Ekman, Magnus ; Karlsson, Martin ; Landin, Anders ; Yip, Sherman ; Zeffer, Håkan ; Tremblay, Marc
Author_Institution :
Sun Microsyst., Santa Clara, CA
Abstract :
Rock, Sun´s third-generation chip-multithreading processor, contains 16 high-performance cores, each of which can support two software threads. Rock uses a novel checkpoint-based architecture to support automatic hardware scouting under a load miss, speculative out-of-order retirement of instructions, and aggressive dynamic hardware parallelization of a sequential instruction stream. It is also the first processor to support transactional memory in hardware.
Keywords :
multi-threading; software architecture; aggressive dynamic hardware parallelization; automatic hardware; checkpoint-based architecture; high-performance Sparc CMT processor; sequential instruction stream; software threads; third-generation chip-multithreading processor; transactional memory; Bandwidth; Computer architecture; Control systems; Hardware; Out of order; Parallel processing; Random access memory; Retirement; Throughput; Yarn; integration and modeling; multicore/single-chip multiprocessors; multithreaded processors; parallel architectures; processor architectures; speculative multithreading; system architectures;
Journal_Title :
Micro, IEEE
