Toward Dark Silicon in Servers

by Nikos Hardavellas, Michael Ferdman, Babak Falsafi, and Anastasia Ailamaki

Although workloads with limited parallelism pose performance challenges with chip multiprocessors (CMPs), server workloads with abundant parallelism are believed to be immune, capable of scaling to the parallelism available in the hardware. Contrary to popular belief, however, CMPs are not a panacea for server processor designs. Despite the inherent scalability in threaded server workloads, increasing core counts can't directly translate into performance improvements because chips are physically constrained in power and off-chip bandwidth. FULL ARTICLE (login required) »