Multiple Clustered Core Processors

Abstract

This paper proposes multiple clustered core processors as a solution that attains both low power consumption and easy programming facility. Considering the current trend of increasing power consumption and temperature, a lot of CPU venders have shipped or announced to ship multiple core processors. Especially, recent studies on heterogeneous multiple core processors show that they are more efficient in energy utilization than homogeneous ones. However, they request programmers to consider complex task scheduling since the size of every task always has to match the performance of core where it is allocated. Multiple clustered core processors relieve them from such a tedious job. Simulation results show that a multiple clustered core processor consumes slightly more power than a heterogeneous multiple core processor. However, in a case, the heterogeneous multiple core processor cannot solve a severe task scheduling problem, while the multiple clustered core processor can.