Simultaneous Multithreading on x86_64 Systems: An Energy Efficiency Evaluation

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

In recent years, power consumption has become one of the most important design criteria for micropro- cessors. CPUs are therefore no longer developed with a narrow focus on raw compute performance. This means that well-established processor features that have proven to increase compute performance now need to be re-evaluated with a new focus on energy efficiency. This paper presents an energy ef- ficiency evaluation of the symmetric multithreading (SMT) feature on state-of-the-art x86 64 processors. We use a mature power measurement methodology to analyze highly sophisticated low-level microbenchmarks as well as a diverse set of application benchmarks. Our results show that–depending on the workload–SMT can be at the same time advantageous in terms of performance and disadvantageous in terms of energy efficiency. Moreover, we demonstrate how the SMT efficiency has advanced between two processor generations.

Details

Original languageUndefined
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 4th Workshop on Power-Aware Computing and Systems
Place of PublicationNew York, NY, USA
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York
Pages10:1-10:5
Number of pages5
ISBN (print)978-1-4503-0981-3
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Peer-reviewedYes

Workshop

TitleWorkshop on Power Aware Computing and Systems
Subtitleco-located with SOSP
Abbreviated titleHotPower'11
Conference number4
Duration23 October 2011
Degree of recognitionInternational event
CityCascais
CountryPortugal

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-8491-770X/work/141543303
Scopus 81055139559
ORCID /0009-0003-0666-4166/work/151475602

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals