Introduction to Throughput Computing

P6 Throughput Computing Overview © 2003 Sun Microsystems
CMT processor simply starts processing another thread, as shown in Figure 1.4.
“Today’s processors can be idle up to 75 percent of the time, leaving considerable room for
improvement in processor design,” said Vernon Turner, Group Vice President, Global Enterprise
Server Solutions at International Data Corporation (IDC). “By focusing on increased application
workload throughput instead of clock frequency, Sun’s CMT processors should deliver significant
increases in application performance.”
Sun’s CMT processors will also have multiple cores on a single piece of silicon, with each
core being able to process multiple threads, as shown in Figure 1.5. As a result, a single CMT
processor will be able to process tens of threads simultaneously, exponentially increasing the
amount of data processed each second.
By 2005, CMT blade processors from Sun are expected to increase today’s blade throughput
by 15 times. Moving beyond 2005, Sun will ship CMT system processors designed to increase the
throughput of current system processors by a factor of 30. By delivering “SMP on a chip” and
dramatically increasing throughput, Sun is igniting a computing revolution.
Figure 1.4: Multithreading Support Allows CMT Chips to
Do Useful Work During Wait Cycles.
Figure 1.5: Multicore CMT Processors Dramatically
Increase Application Throughput.