Evaluating the Speedup of Multicore Architecture on the Topological Characteristics of On-chip Memory

Abstract

Being the most important underlying backbone of a multicore processor, the interconnection network for on-chip memory has a significant impact on the performance of a multicore processor. The evaluation for the type network is almost the first step of designing a new architecture for a multicore processor. For this type of evaluation, however, there are few effective methods available because of the too much uncertainty, especially the need to compare with a great number of different multicore networks on chip. This article presents ETOM (Evaluation on Topology of On-chip Memory), a new method to evaluate the speedup of multicore architectures. ETOM can accurately figure out the contribution of each core to the overall performance of a multicore processor, while all of the cores are controlled by the topology of on-chip memory network, the contributions of cores can certainly illustrate how and how much the topology affects the overall performance, and then a targeted modification to the topology can be made.