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black-parrot / black-parrot-sim

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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BlackParrot 16 cores #17

Closed amithmath closed 1 year ago

amithmath commented 1 year ago

I am curious to know why BlackParrot scale up to 16 cores? Why not 32 cores, 64 cores, etc.? Is there any limitations with respect to linux OS? Or any other issues?

dpetrisko commented 1 year ago

It's a good question. There is no physical design restriction on number of cores since the interconnect fabric is based on a scalable wormhole mesh. 16 cores was simply our original target for architectural tuning.

Once you go past 16 cores, traditional coherence protocols start to become more of an performance overhead and schemes such as hierarchical snooping and partial directories become more attractive. Because we haven't explored these techniques, we haven't tried to scale further.

However, give it a try! Would love to see a 64 core BP chip

amithmath commented 1 year ago

OK got it thanks.