SMT and CMP Architectures

DINESH

INTRODUCTION
Contemporary forms of parallelism
Instruction-level parallelism(ILP)
Wide-issue Superscalar processors (SS)
4 or more instruction per cycle
Executing a single program or thread
Attempts to find multiple instructions to issue each cycle.
Out-of-order execution => instructions are sent to execution
units based on instruction dependencies rather than program
order
Thread-level parallelism(TLP)
Fine-grained multithreaded superscalars(FGMS)
Contain hardware state for several threads
Executing multiple threads
On any given cycle a processor executes instructions from one
of the threads
Multiprocessor(MP)
Performance improved by adding more CPUs

Simultaneous Multithreading
Key idea
Issue multiple instructions from multiple threads each
cycle
Features
Fully exploit thread-level parallelism and instruction-
level parallelism.
Multiple functional units
Modern processors have more functional units available then a
single thread can utilize.
Register renaming and dynamic scheduling
Multiple instructions from independent threads can co-exist
and co-execute.


Summary: Multithreaded Categories
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Superscalar Fine-Grained Coarse-Grained
Simultaneous
Multithreading
Thread 1
Thread 2
Thread 3
Thread 4
Thread 5
Idle slot
Horizontal dimension represents the instruction issue
capabilty in each clock cycles.
Vertical dimension represents a sequence of clock cycles.
Empty slots indicates that the corresponding issue slots
are unused in that clock cycles.
Superscalar processor with no multithreading:
only one thread is processed in one clock cycle
Use of issue slots is limited by a lack of ILP.
Stalls such as an instruction cache miss leaves the entire processor
idle.
Fine-grained multithreading:
switches threads on every clock cycle
Pro: hide latency of from both short and long stalls
Con: Slows down execution of the individual threads ready to go.
Only one thread issues inst. In a given clock cycle.
Course-grained multithreading:
switches threads only on costly stalls
(e.g., L2 stalls)
Pros: no switching each clock cycle, no slow down for ready-to-go
threads. Reduces no of completely idle clock cycles.
Con: limitations in hiding shorter stalls

Simultaneous Multithreading:
exploits TLP at the same time it exploits ILP with multiple
threads using the issue slots in a single-clock cycle.
issue slots is limited by the following factors:
Imbalances in the resource needs.
Resource availability over multiple threads.
Number of active threads considered.
Finite limitations of buffer.
Ability to fetch enough instructions from
multiple threads.
Practical limitations of what instructions
combinations can issue from one thread and
multiple threads.

Performance Implications of SMT
Single thread performance is likely to go down (caches,
branch predictors, registers, etc. are shared) this effect
can be mitigated by trying to prioritize one thread
While fetching instructions, thread priority can
dramatically influence total throughput a widely
accepted heuristic (ICOUNT): fetch such that each thread
has an equal share of processor resources
With eight threads in a processor with many resources,
SMT yields throughput improvements of roughly 2-4
Alpha 21464 and Intel Pentium 4 are examples of SMT
Effectively Using Parallelism on a SMT Processor
Parallel workload
threads SS MP2 MP4 FGMT SMT
1 3.3 2.4 1.5 3.3 3.3
2 -- 4.3 2.6 4.1 4.7
4 -- -- 4.2 4.2 5.6
8 -- -- -- 3.5 6.1
Instruction Throughput executing a parallel workload
Comparison of SMT vs
Superscalar
SMT processors are compared to base superscalar
processors in several key measures :
Utilization of functional units.
Utilization of fetch units.
Accuracy of branch predictor.
Hit rates of primary caches.
Hit rates of secondary caches.
Performance improvement:
Issue slots.
Funtional units.
Renaming registers.
CMP Architecture
Chip-level multiprocessing(CMP or multicore):
integrates two or more independent cores(normally a
CPU) into a single package composed of a single
integrated circuit(IC), called a die, or more dies
packaged, each executing threads independently.
Every funtional units of a processor is duplicated.
Multiple processors, each with a full set of
architectural resources, reside on the same die
Processors may share an on-chip cache
or each can have its own cache
Examples: HP Mako, IBM Power4
Challenges: Power, Die area (cost)


Single core computer
Single core
Single core CPU chip
Multi-core CPU chip
Core 1 Core 2
Core 3
Core 4
Chip Multithreading = Chip Multiprocessing + Hardware
Multithreading.

Chip Multithreading is the capability of a processor to process
multiple s/w threads simulataneous h/w threads of execution.

CMP is achieved by multiple cores on a single chip or multiple
threads on a single core.

CMP processors are especially suited to server workloads, which
generally have high levels of Thread-Level Parallelism(TLP).

Chip Multithreading
CMPs Performance
CMPs are now the only way to build high performance
microprocessors , for a variety of reasons:
o Large uniprocessors are no longer scaling in performance,
because it is only possible to extract a limited amount of
parallelism from a typical instruction stream.
o Cannot simply ratchet up the clock speed on todays
processors,or the power dissipation will become prohibitive.
o CMT processors support many h/w strands through efficient
sharing of on-chip resources such as pipelines, caches and
predictors.
o CMT processors are a good match for server workloads,which
have high levels of TLP and relatively low levels of ILP.
SMT and CMP
The performance race between SMT and CMP is not yet decided.
CMP is easier to implement, but only SMT has the ability to hide
latencies.
A functional partitioning is not exactly reached within a SMT
processor due to the centralized instruction issue.
o A separation of the thread queues is a possible solution,
although it does not remove the central instruction issue.
o A combination of simultaneous multithreading with the CMP
may be superior.
Research : combine SMT or CMP organization with the ability to
create threads with compiler support of fully dynamically out of a
single thread.
o Thread-level speculation
o Close to multiscalar


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Multiprocessor vs. SMT
Multiprocessor(MP2) SMT
Unutilized
Thread 1
Thread 2
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