Keynote talk challenges in chip multiprocessor memory systems

The semiconductor industry appears on the brink of an arms race, competing to see which company can cram the most cores on a single die. Yet early entries are hardly well-balanced, general-purpose computers: Sun's Niagara has feeble floating-point performance and IBM's Cell processor is a thinly disguised GPU. Worse, no company has announced anything that will help address the real problem: programming the multithreaded applications needed to exploit the ample computational resources. This talk will discuss several challenges facing the memory system designers of emerging computation-rich chip multiprocessors.