Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rob Young who wrote (135391)	5/17/2001 2:26:21 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Uh oh. Foster was rumored to have SMT too. What ever happened to the much dreaded "Jackson Technology" anyway?

To: Rob Young who wrote (135391)	5/17/2001 2:56:49 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Rob, <I would like to spend a long technical back and forth about SMT and how it will be very advantageous with apps with very little ILP> I'll look through your links sometime. Here are my biggest concerns regarding SMT: 1) Validation - It's hard enough validating a single-threaded processor with all of its OOO complexity. Wouldn't adding another thread to the execution stream increase the validation space exponentially? 2) Software support - The spinning semaphore problem is one issue that Alpha already addressed, but are there others? Is it really trivial to get existing apps running on SMT, or will they have to support it explicitly? 3) Memory bandwidth requirements - It's been suggested that SMT processors are more tolerant to latency because if one thread is stalled behind a cache miss, the other thread(s) can still make progress. That means sustained bandwidth becomes much more important than before, and latency becomes much less important. (This is an interesting phenomenon, given that the Rambus saga helped to bring about the entire latency-vs-bandwidth debate.) 4) Impact on caches - How robust will the cache hierarchy need to be in order to handle the needs of two or more simultaneously running threads? SMT is kind of pointless if it causes massive cache thrashing. Tenchusatsu