Experimental Evaluation of Emerging Multi-core Architectures

The trend of increasing speed and complexity in the single-core processor as stated in the Moore's law is facing practical challenges. As a result, the multi-core processor architecture has emerged as the dominant architecture for both desktop and high-performance systems. Multi-core systems introduce many challenges that need to be addressed to achieve the best performance. Therefore, a new set of benchmarking techniques to study the impacts of the multi-core technologies is necessary. In this paper, multi-core specific performance metrics for cache coherency and memory bandwidth/latency/contention are investigated. This study also proposes a new benchmarking suite which includes cases extended from the high performance computing challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite. Performance results are measured on a Sun Fire T1000 server with six cores and an AMD Opteron dual core system. Experimental analysis and observations in this paper provide for a better understanding of the emerging multi-core architectures.