A Single Chip Multiprocessor Integrated with DRAM

We evaluate the performance of a single chip multiprocessor integrated with DRAM. We compare the performance of this architecture with that of a more conventional chip which only has on-chip SRAM. The DRAM-based architecture with four processors performs an average of 52% faster than the SRAM-based architecture on floating point applications with large working sets. This is performance difference is significantly better than a uniprocessor DRAM-based architecture, which only performs an average of only 4% faster than an SRAM-based architecture on the same applications. These results demonstrate that a multiprocessor takes better advantage of the large bandwidth provided by the on-chip DRAM than a uniprocessor.

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