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