Outrider

Abstract

We present Outrider, an architecture for throughput-oriented processors that provides memory latency tolerance to improve performance on highly threaded workloads. Outrider enables a single thread of execution to be presented to the architecture as multiple decoupled instruction streams that separate memory-accessing and memory-consuming instructions. The key insight is that by decoupling the instruction streams, the processor pipeline can tolerate memory latency in a way similar to out-of-order designs while relying on a low-complexity in-order micro-architecture. Moreover, instead of adding more threads as is done in modern GPUs, Outrider can tolerate memory latency with fewer threads and reduced contention for resources shared amongst threads.We demonstrate that Outrider can outperform single threaded cores by 23-131% and a 4-way simultaneous multithreaded core by up to 87% on data parallel applications in a 1024-core system. Moreover, Outrider achieves these performance gains without incurring the overhead of additional hardware thread contexts, which results in improved area efficiency compared to a multithreaded core.

SWOOP: software-hardware co-design for non-speculative, execute-ahead, in-order cores

“…Generally, compiler assisted techniques with hardware support rely on statically generated entities that execute efficiently on customized architectures: Braid [71] runs dataflow subgraphs on lower complexity architectures to save energy, while Outrider [17] supports highly efficient simultaneous multithreading. Speculative multithreading executes pre-computation slices [56] with architectural support to validate speculations, relies on ultra-light-weight threads to perform prefetching [13,18,61] or requires hardware communication channels between the prefetching and the main thread [49,53,58].…”

SWOOP: software-hardware co-design for non-speculative, execute-ahead, in-order cores

“…Generally, compiler assisted techniques with hardware support rely on statically generated entities that execute eiciently on customized architectures: Braid [71] runs datalow subgraphs on lower complexity architectures to save energy, while Outrider [17] supports highly eicient simultaneous multithreading. Speculative multithreading executes pre-computation slices [56] with architectural support to validate speculations, relies on ultra-light-weight threads to perform prefetching [13,18,61] or requires hardware communication channels between the prefetching and the main thread [49,53,58].…”