THE CASE FOR A SINGLE-CHIP MULTIPROCESSOR

Advances in IC processing allow for more microprocessor design options . The increasing gate density and cost of wires in advanced integrated circuit technologies require that we look for new ways to use their c apabilities effectively. This paper shows that in advanced technologie s it is possible to implement a single-chip multiprocessor in the same area as a wide issue superscalar processor. We find that for applicat ions with little parallelism the performance of the two microarchitect ures is comparable. For applications with large amounts of parallelism at both the fine and coarse grained levels, the multiprocessor microa rchitecture outperforms the superscalar architecture by a significant margin. Single-chip multiprocessor architectures have the advantage in that they offer localized implementation of a high-clock rate process or for inherently sequential applications and low latency interprocess or communication for parallel applications.