Understanding the energy efficiency of simultaneous multithreading

Citation:

Yingmin Li, David Brooks, Zhigang Hu, Kevin Skadron, and Pradip Bose. 8/11/2004. “Understanding the energy efficiency of simultaneous multithreading.” In Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Low power electronics and design, Pp. 44–49. Newport Beach, CA, USA: ACM. Publisher's Version

Abstract:

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) has proven to be an effective method of increasing the performance of microprocessors by extracting additional instruction-level parallelism from multiple threads. In current microprocessor designs, power-efficiency is of critical importance, and we present modeling extensions to an architectural simulator to allow us to study the power-performance efficiency of SMT. After a thorough design space exploration we find that SMT can provide a performance speedup of nearly 20% for a wide range of applications with a power overhead of roughly 24%. Thus, SMT can provide a substantial benefit for energy-efficiency metrics such as ED/sup 2/. We also explore the underlying reasons for the power uplift, analyze the impact of leakage-sensitive process technologies, and discuss our model validation strategy.
Last updated on 05/04/2022