Why multiprocessing

Computer architects have become stymied by the growing mismatch in CPU operating frequencies and DRAM access times. None of the techniques that exploited instruction-level parallelism (ILP) within one program could make up for the long stalls that occurred when data had to be fetched from main memory. Additionally, the large transistor counts and high operating frequencies needed for the more advanced ILP techniques required power dissipation levels that could no longer be cheaply cooled. For these reasons, newer generations of computers have started to exploit higher levels of parallelism that exist outside of a single program or program thread.

Conceptually, multithreading is equivalent to a context switch at the operating system level. The difference is that a multithreaded CPU can do a thread switch in one CPU cycle instead of the hundreds or thousands of CPU cycles a context switch normally requires. This is achieved by replicating the state hardware (such as the register file and program counter) for each active thread.

In processor design, there are two ways to increase on-chip parallelism with fewer resource requirements: one is superscalar technique which tries to exploit instruction level parallelism (ILP); the other is multithreading approach exploiting thread level parallelism (TLP).

Interleaved multithreading Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) Chip-level multiprocessing (CMP or multicore) Any combination of multithreaded/SMT/CMP The key factor to distinguish them is to look at how many instructions the processor can issue in one cycle and how many threads from which the instructions come.