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ISCA
2002
IEEE

Tarantula: A Vector Extension to the Alpha Architecture

13 years 8 months ago
Tarantula: A Vector Extension to the Alpha Architecture
Tarantula is an aggressive floating point machine targeted at technical, scientific and bioinformatics workloads, originally planned as a follow-on candidate to the EV8 processor [6, 5]. Tarantula adds to the EV8 core a vector unit capable of 32 double-precision flops per cycle. The vector unit fetches data directly from a 16 MByte second level cache with a peak bandwidth of sixty four 64-bit values per cycle. The whole chip is backed by a memory controller capable of delivering over 64 GBytes/s of raw bandwidth. Tarantula extends the Alpha ISA with new vector instructions that operate on new architectural state. Salient features of the architecture and implementation are: (1) it fully integrates into a virtual-memory cache-coherent system without changes to its coherency protocol, (2) provides high bandwidth for non-unit stride memory accesses, (3) supports gather/scatter instructions efficiently, (4) fully integrates with the EV8 core with a narrow, streamlined interface, rather...
Roger Espasa, Federico Ardanaz, Julio Gago, Roger
Added 15 Jul 2010
Updated 15 Jul 2010
Type Conference
Year 2002
Where ISCA
Authors Roger Espasa, Federico Ardanaz, Julio Gago, Roger Gramunt, Isaac Hernandez, Toni Juan, Joel S. Emer, Stephen Felix, P. Geoffrey Lowney, Matthew Mattina, André Seznec
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