Evaluation of Multithreaded Processors and Thread-Switch Policies

This paper examines the use of coarse-grained multithreading to lessen the negative impact of memory access latencies on the performance of uniprocessor on-line transaction processing systems. It considers the effect of switching threads on cache misses in a two-level cache system. It also examines several different thread-switch policies. The results suggest that multithreading with a small number (3–5) of active threads can significantly improve the performance of such commercial environments.

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