同时多微线程体系结构研究

随着生产工艺的提高,芯片上能集成越来越多的晶体管,多线程技术也逐步成为一种主流的处理器体系结构技术.提出一种融合同时多线程技术和微线程技术的新型体系结构同时多微线程(simultaneous multi-microthreading,SMMT),并给出同时多微线程体系结构的实现方案.SMMT有效结合同时多线程技术硬件代价小和微线程技术能够加速单进程应用的优点,通过软硬件协同的方式充分挖掘单进程程序的微线程级并行性.通过在设计的龙芯2号同时多微线程处理器上进行性能评测,结果表明,同时多微线程体系结构能够有效地加速单进程的程序,以很小的硬件代价显著地提高了处理器的性能.

Research on Simultaneous Multi-Microthreading Architecture

With the development of VLSI technology, a single chip can contain over one billion transistor. Multithreading technique is the developing trend of high performance processor in the future. A novel processor architecture and implementation scheme of the simultaneous multi-microthreading(SMMT) that combines simultaneous multithreading technique with microthreading technique is proposed in this paper. SMMT efficiently combines the advantage of little hardware overhead in simultaneous multithreading with the ability of speeding up single program in micro-threading. SMMT can exploit the microthreading-level parallelism of single program fully by means of software and hardware co-design. Simultaneous multi-microthreading architecture is implemented on Godson-2 processor to evaluate performance. The evaluation results show that simultaneous multi-microthreading speeds up the execution of a single program significantly. It improves the performance of microprocessors with little hardware overhead.