An Asymptotic Performance/Energy Analysis and Optimization of Multi-core Architectures

In this paper, we develop asymptotic analysis models for better understanding the performance and energy consumption characteristics of multi-core processor architectures using Amdahl’s law in order to foresee their performance and energy impacts for given workload characteristics (e.g. available parallelism). Through the asymptotic analysis and optimization based on the models proposed in this paper, we can make system-level architectural design decisions on “the number of cores” and “core size” of a multi-core architecture with regarding performance and energy consumption at an initial phase of designs. In addition, we expect that we can probe the possible research direction of optimizing the performance and energy of multi-core architectures by exploring their design spaces with the proposed models.