From the July-December 2012 issue

MultiAmdahl: How Should I Divide My Heterogenous Chip?

By Tsahee Zidenberg, Isaac Keslassy, and Uri Weiser

Future multiprocessor chips will integrate many different units, each tailored to a specific computation. When designing such a system, a chip architect must decide how to distribute the available limited system resources, such as area and power, among all the computational units.In this paper, we introduce MultiAmdahl, an analytical optimization technique for resource sharing among heterogeneous units. MultiAmdahl takes into account the workload, the performance of each computational unit, and the total available resource. The results obtained by MultiAmdahl allow us, for example, to provide a closed-form solution for an optimal asymmetric-offload chip, and to analyze the impact of different design constraints on an optimal chip architecture.

 View the PDF of this article       View this issue in the digital library

---

Editorials and Announcements

Announcements

• We are pleased to announce that José Martinez, an associate professor at Cornell University, is the new Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters starting in 2013. Dr. Martinez has served as the Associate Editor-in-Chief of CAL since early 2011 and he looks forward to continuing CAL's success

Annual Index

• The 2012 CAL Annual Index is now available. (PDF)

---

Access recently published CAL articles

Subscribe to the RSS feed of latest CAL content added to the digital library.

Sign up for the Transactions Connection newsletter.

---

Download the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters flyer (PDF)