In a recent paper, Professor Xian-He Sun reevaluates Amdahl’s law for multicore processors. This paper introduces fixed-time speedup and memory-bounded speedup models to evaluate scalable computing for multicore architectures.
Abstract:
Microprocessor architecture has entered the multicore era. Recently, Hill and Marty presented a pessimistic view of multicore scalability. Their analysis was based on Amdahl’s law (i.e. fixed-workload conditions) and challenged readers to develop better models. In this study, we analyze multicore scalability under fixed-time and memory-bound conditions and from the data access (memory wall) perspective. We use the same hardware cost model of multicore chips used by Hill and Marty, but achieve very different and more optimistic performance models. These models show that there is no inherent, immovable upper bound on the scalability of multicore architectures. These results complement existing studies and demonstrate that multicore architectures are capable of extensive scalability.
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Amdahl’s Law in the Multicore Era
Scalable Computing in Multicore Era
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