Dubbed Hornet, the system is designed to model the performance of multi-core processors much more accurately than existing tools. The result, the team claims, is a tool that will make it a lot easier to evaluate many-core processor designs before committing to a run of silicon.Full details over here.
When scaling a processor design to hundreds - or, in some cases, thousands - of cores, things get extremely complex. As a trade-off, previous modelling systems have sacrificed accuracy in the name of efficiency in software systems and depended on scale models built from field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) where more accurate simulations are required.
Myong Hyon Cho, PhD student at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, claims Hornet offers something to fans of either approach. 'We think that Hornet sits in the sweet spot between them.'
MIT Hornet helps with multi-core processors development
Posted on Monday, March 05 2012 @ 21:09 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bit Tech reports MIT researchers have devised a more accurate system to model the performance of multi-core processors. The scientists claim that unlike existing simulators, their Hornet simulator is cycle-accurate even when dealing with models of 1,000 core chips.