Application demands: Our insatiable need for computing cycles
-
Scientific computing: CFD, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, ...
-
General-purpose computing: Video, Graphics, CAD, Databases, TP...
|
Technology Trends
-
Number of transistors on chip growing rapidly
-
Clock rates expected to go up only slowly
|
Architecture Trends
-
Instruction-level parallelism(ILP) valuable but limited
-
Coarser-level parallelism, as in Multiprocessors, the most viable approach
|
|
Economics
|
Current trends:
-
Today's microprocessors have multiprocessor(MP) support
-
Servers and workstations becoming MP: Sun, SGI, DEC, COMPAQ!...
-
Tomorrow's microprocessors are multiprocessors
|
