Measuring the performance of multithreaded processors

Abstract

Nowadays, multithreaded architectures are becoming more and more popular. In fact, many processor vendors have already shipped processors with multithreaded features. Regardless of this push on multithreaded processors, still today there is not a clear procedure that defines how to measure the behavior of a multithreaded processor. This paper presents FAME, a new evaluation methodology aimed to fairly measure the performance of multithreaded processors. FAME can be used in conjunction with any of the metrics proposed for multithreaded processors like IPC throughput, weighted speedup, etc. The idea behind FAME is to reexecute all threads in a multithreaded workload until all of them are fairly represented in the final measurements taken from the workload. Then these measurements will be combined with the corresponding metric to obtain a final value that quantifies the performance of the processor under consideration.