Pangaea: a tightly-coupled IA32 heterogeneous chip multiprocessor

Moore’s Law and the drive towards performance efficiency have led to the on-chip integration of general-purpose cores with special-purpose accelerators. Pangaea is a heterogeneous CMP design for non-rendering workloads that integrates IA32 CPU cores with non-IA32 GPU-class multicores, extending the current state-of-the-art CPU-GPU integration that physically “fuses” existing CPU and GPU designs. Pangaea introduces (1) a resource repartitioning of the GPU, where the hardware budget dedicated for 3Dspecific graphics processing is used to build more generalpurpose GPU cores, and (2) a 3-instruction extension to the IA32 ISA that supports tighter architectural integration and fine-grain shared memory collaborative multithreading between the IA32 CPU cores and the non-IA32 GPU cores. We implement Pangaea and the current CPU-GPU designs in fully-functional synthesizable RTL based on the production quality RTL of an IA32 CPU and an Intel GMA X4500 GPU. On a 65 nm ASIC process technol...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: IEEEPACT
• Authors: Henry Wong, Anne Bracy, Ethan Schuchman, Tor M. Aamodt, Jamison D. Collins, Perry H. Wang, Gautham N. Chinya, Ankur Khandelwal Groen, Hong Jiang, Hong Wang 0003
• Keywords: CPU Cores, GPU Cores, Hardware, IA32, IEEEPACT 2008