Surviving the Design of Microprocessor and Multimicroprocessor Systems: Lessons Learned

"This book … uniquely synthesizes Professor Milutinovi???’s thinking on the important issues in computer architecture … The result is a necessarily somewhat eclectic, personal statement by one of the leaders of the field." —Michael J. Flynn, Stanford University From the Foreword "How do we invest one billion transistors on a single chip?" asks Veljko Milutinovi??? as he ponders the ultimate goal of an entire distributed shared memory (DSM)—plus numerous specialized accelerators—on a single chip. He then goes on to present a lively personal account, complete with survival tips, of his experiences in the front line of the rapidly evolving arena of microprocessor and multimicroprocessor system design. Focusing on areas critical to the future of system-on-a-chip design, Milutinovi??? combines his unique perspective with authoritative discussions of cache, instruction level parallelism, prediction strategies, the I/O bottleneck, multithreading, and multiprocessors. He reinforces concepts using three case studies of his own computer system/accelerator implementations with additional details available through Web-based appendices. A key DSM concept, Reflective Memory System (RMS), and tools for evaluating new architectural ideas or characterizing applications are also covered in appendices. Designed for fast, easy comprehension, Surviving the Design of Microprocessor and Multimicroprocessor Systems integrates clear, up-to-date explanations with a wealth of figures and a thorough review of the technical literature. It brings readers up to speed with concepts essential for implementing their own ideas, while addressing the most important issues facing scientists and engineers in advanced computer design.