Yield-aware Performance-Cost Characterization for Multi-Core SIMT

Abstract

Redundancy is now routinely allocated in circuits, microarchitectural structures, or at the system level, to mitigate mounting manufacturing yield losses. In this paper, we propose spare lane sharing, which reduces the cost of multi-core SIMT systems by allowing one of two neighboring cores to make use of a redundant lane if necessary. We have evaluated the performance-cost trade-offs of core-, lane-, and shared-lane-sparing under a variety of benchmarks, and found that for nearly all applications shared-lane-sparing outperforms lane-sparing, reducing cost by up to 20%.