Implicit vs. Explicit Resource Allocation in SMT Processors

Francisco J. Cazorla, Peter M. W. Knijnenburg, Rizos Sakellariou, Enrique Fernández, Alex Ramírez, Mateo Valero

Abstract: In a simultaneous multithreaded (SMT) architecture, the front end of a superscalar is adapted in order to be able to fetch from several threads while the back end is shared among the threads. In this paper, we describe different resource sharing models in SMT processors. We show that explicit resource allocation can improve SMT performance. In addition, it enables SMTs to solve other QoS requirements, not realizable before.