PTSMT: A Tool for Cross-Level Power, Performance, and Thermal Exploration of SMT Processors

Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) processors are becoming popular because they exploit both instruction-level and threadlevel parallelism by issuing instructions from different threads in the same cycle. However, the issues of power and thermal management hinder SMT processors fabricated in nano-scale technologies. Power and thermal issues in SMT processors not only limit the achievable performance, but also have a direct impact on the cost and viability of these processors. While several performance simulation tools to explore the performance aspect of SMT processors early in their design phase exist, there is a lack of early power and performance evaluation tools for SMT processors. To this end, we have developed PTSMT: a tightly coupled power, performance and thermal exploration tool for SMT processors. In this paper, we demonstrate that PTSMT can automatically and effectively accomplish power, performance and thermal exploration of SMT processors at various levels of design hiera...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: VLSID
• Authors: Deepa Kannan, Aseem Gupta, Aviral Shrivastava, Nikil D. Dutt, Fadi J. Kurdahi
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, Hinder Smt Processors, Performance Evaluation Tools, SMT Processors, VLSID 2008