Single-ISA Heterogeneous Multi-Core Architectures for Multithreaded Workload Performance

Abstract

A single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core architecture is achip multiprocessor composed of cores of varying size, performance,and complexity. This paper demonstrates that thisarchitecture can provide significantly higher performance inthe same area than a conventional chip multiprocessor. It doesso by matching the various jobs of a diverse workload to thevarious cores. This type of architecture covers a spectrum ofworkloads particularly well, providing high single-thread performancewhen thread parallelism is low, and high throughputwhen thread parallelism is high.This paper examines two such architectures in detail,demonstrating dynamic core assignment policies that providesignificant performance gains over naive assignment, andeven outperform the best static assignment. It examines policiesfor heterogeneous architectures both with and withoutmultithreading cores. One heterogeneous architecture we examineoutperforms the comparable-area homogeneous architectureby up to 63%, and our best core assignment strategyachieves up to 31% speedup over a naive policy.