Abstract:

Despite increased core counts that provide significant throughput performance gains, single thread performance is still an important metric in today’s processor designs. Due to chip power constraints, architects must carefully allocate power budgets to additional cores or increased single thread performance. To study this tradeoff between different performance metrics, we construct an analytical model that computes single thread and throughput performance under a given power budget for both symmetric and asymmetric multicore architectures. We also consider multi-task workloads, where optimal designs might include more than one large core in the heterogeneous architecture. Our analytical model considers the optimal number and complexity of cores in a processor and quantifies the benefits of asymmetric designs when trading latency and throughput. We show that a diverse set of core designs can be optimal in different scenarios.