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Extreme Multithreading on a Chip

Posted by chrisd on from the less-chips-more-mips dept.

kid writes "There's an interesting interview with Dr. Marc Tremblay at Ace's Hardware. Dr. Tremblay is a distinguished engineer at Sun and the co-architect of the UltraSPARC processor. He is currently working on a processor that is claimed to deliver 30 times the performance of current CPUs utilizing an agressive multi-core/multi-threaded architecture. He talks about upcoming highly multithreaded CPUs from Sun as well as a wide range of problems facing today's CPU designers, from branch mispredictions to DRAM latency/bandwidth and power dissipation, and the ways in which he is working on solving them."

2 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Hard to program? by moosesocks · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I remember that BeOS was extremely multi-threaded, which made it a pain to effectively write complex software applications for. Wouldn't this also be the case for the SPARC.

    That being said, multi-threaded processing certainly speeds up an OS. BeOS is by far the fastest OS i've ever used.

    --
    -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
    1. Re:Hard to program? by Circuit+Breaker · · Score: 4, Informative

      When you say "fast", do you mean "responsive"?

      There's no speed magic to multithreading on a single thread single CPU system - actually, preemptive multitasking can only reduce raw CPU power.

      For desktop systems, responsiveness is far more important than raw speed - but Sun is in the server business, in which desktop-style responsiveness is less important.

      Furthermore, do not confuse CPU threads with O/S threads; CPU threads may just as well run distinct processes which have no relation to each other - in fact there are architectures that use this as an advantage and do away with a memory cache.

      Multiple threads make software hard to develop (and to debug and test). Multiple processes, essentially threads without a shared address space, much less so. Assuming, of course, that the address space is NOT shared....