Transcript New Opportunities for Computer Architecture Research

Challenges and Opportunities
for System SW in the CMP Era
Chuck Moore
AMD Senior Fellow
June 2007
WIOSCA Workshop Panel
Unexpected lessons learned during
the past decade
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Strength of the compatibility requirement
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Change occurs much more slowly than people want to believe
x86 & IBM S/390 longevity have lapped most RISC architectures
Our history shows:
Viable products don’t bet on wildly incompatible solutions
Actual results  weakest link in the HW/SW symbiotic relationship
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The economic realities of our industry can be painful
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The best technology rarely wins
Simplicity usually trumps complexity  Time-to-Market
Power issues emerged as the one of the most limiting
constraints of modern chip design
06/09/07
WIOSCA Panel - ISCA 2007
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Some Specific Challenges
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Dealing w/ the implicit serial “structural
compatibility” requirement of most of today’s
applications
Optimization balance between single-thread
performance and throughput performance
Building reliable platforms from increasingly
unreliable technology
Control mechanisms to appropriately manage
non-traditional resources
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Power, Heat, Maintenance, Errors, and more coming …
WIOSCA Panel - ISCA 2007
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Some Specific Opportunities
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System-level ISA
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Coprocessor enablement
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“It’s the synchronization, stupid ”
Abstraction and compatibility
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Think page ops, table lookups, transforms, etc
Envision the “7-layer ISO model for computing ”
Scarcity versus abundance
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06/09/07
Abundant:
Scarce:
transistors, designers, raw FLOPs
pwr-eff, bw-eff, TTM, flexibility,
programmer productivity
WIOSCA Panel - ISCA 2007
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