Abstract

We apply Amdahl’s Law to multicore chips using symmetric cores, asymmetric cores, and dynamic techniques that allow cores to work together on sequential execution. To Amdahl’s simple software model, we add a simple hardware model based on fixed chip resources. Our results encourage multicore designers to view performance of the entire chip rather than focusing on core efficiencies. Moreover, we observe that obtaining optimal multicore performance requires further research in both extracting more parallelism and making sequential cores faster. We seek to stimulate discussion and future work, as well as temper the current pendulum swing from the past’s under-emphasis on parallel research to a future with too little sequential research.

Citations