What Hill-Marty model learn from and break through Amdahl's law?

摘要

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) or multicores are emerging as the dominant computing platform. Recently, Hill and Marty developed the model which augmenting Amdahl's law to the multicore hardware, and this model has received great attention. However, there are still the following fundamental problems in the perspective of theory remains unsolved, such as: How general is the observation in Hill-Marty model, does it only hold for some specific architectures? As a corollary of Amdahl's law, what does Hill-Marty model learn from and break through Amdahl's law? This paper investigates an analytical and quantitative analysis to these problems, the obtained results could provide computer architects with a better understanding of multicore scalability.