Rock: A SPARC CMT Processor
Sun’s Shailender Chaudhry delivered a presentation at the August 2000 “Hot Chips” conference. Slides from the talk, “Rock: A third Generation 65nm, 16-Core, 32 Thread + 32 Scout-Threads CMT SPARC Processor” are available on-line in PDF format.
“The goals for this high-end commercial microprocessor are high throughput and high single-thread performance, mainframe-class reliability, hardware transactional memory, and linear scalability. We show how these goals are met by the logical and physical design of this 2.3GHz 396mm2 16-core 32-thread plus 32-scout-thread microprocessor.”
Tremblay’s and Shailender Chaudhry’s paper A Third-Generation 65nm 16-Core 32-Thread Plus 32-Scout-Thread CMT SPARC Processor is also available online. They discuss the logical and physical design of Rock, including its 2.3GHz, 396mm, 16 core, 32 thread, plus 32 scout threads. Rock is the first CPU to implement scout threads and transactional memory.
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