research-article

Open access

There’s No Such Thing as a General-purpose Processor: And the belief in such a device is harmful

Author:

David ChisnallAuthors Info & Claims

Queue, Volume 12, Issue 10

Pages 20 - 25

https://doi.org/10.1145/2685690.2687011

Published: 08 October 2014 Publication History

All formats PDF

Abstract

There is an increasing trend in computer architecture to categorize processors and accelerators as "general purpose." Of the papers published at this year’s International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2014), nine out of 45 explicitly referred to general-purpose processors; one additionally referred to general-purpose FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), and another referred to general-purpose MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) supercomputers, stretching the definition to the breaking point. This article presents the argument that there is no such thing as a truly general-purpose processor and that the belief in such a device is harmful.

References

[1]

Baumann, A., Barham, P., Dagand, P.-E., Harris, T. L., Isaacs, R., Peter, S., Roscoe, T., Schüpbach, A., Singhania, A. 2009. The multikernel: a new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 22nd Symposium on Operating Systems Principles: 29-44.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Denning, P. J. 1968. The working-set model for program behavior. Communications of the ACM 11(5): 323-333.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Gschwind, M., Hofstee, H. P., Flachs, B., Hopkins, M., Watanabe, Y., Yamazaki, T. 2006. Synergistic processing in Cell's multicore architecture. IEEE Micro 26(2): 10-24.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Kim, J. M., Seo, S. K., Chung, S. W. 2014. Looking into heterogeneity: when simple is faster. In The 2nd International Workshop on Parallelism in Mobile Platforms.

Google Scholar

[5]

Patterson, D. A., Sequin, C. H. 1981. RISC I: a reduced instruction set VLSI computer. In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Symposium on Computer Architecture: 443-457.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Popek, G. J., Goldberg, R. P. 1974. Formal requirements for virtualizable third-generation architectures. Communications of the ACM 17(7): 412-421.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

SPARC International Inc. 1992. SPARC Architecture Manual: Version 8. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Wall, D. W. 1993. Limits of instruction-level parallelism. Technical report, Digital Equipment Corporation Western Research Laboratory.

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Chisnall D(2024)How to Design an ISACommunications of the ACM10.1145/364053867:5(60-66)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3640538
Chisnall D(2024)How to Design an ISAQueue10.1145/363944521:6(27-46)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3639445
Karpowicz MArabas PNiewiadomska-Szynkiewicz E(2018)Design and implementation of energy-aware application-specific CPU frequency governors for the heterogeneous distributed computing systemsFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2016.05.01178(302-315)Online publication date: Jan-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2016.05.011
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

There’s No Such Thing as a General-purpose Processor: And the belief in such a device is harmful
1. Applied computing
  1. Physical sciences and engineering
    1. Electronics

Recommendations

Demo: Atlas Thing Architecture: Enabling Mobile Apps as Things in the IoT
MobiCom '17: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

We make the case for mobile apps as crucial and influential things in the Internet of Things (IoT) and then present our Atlas Thing Architecture that provides the explicit support necessary for their inclusion. We present the World Cup demo scenario ...
A pattern for a Secure IoT Thing
EuroPLoP '21: Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

IoT systems are very complex systems with an extensive attack surface, which makes them susceptible to a large variety of threats. It is important that every component in an IoT architecture be secure, any weak point can allow an adversary to penetrate ...
Buddy Thing: Browsing as a Service for the Internet of Things
SCC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing

The Internet of Things (IoT), which connects things to the Internet, is being ushered in recent years. On top of that, the Web of Things (WoT) presents a new World Wide Web (WWW) with vast contents from thing resources. To date, these resources are ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

Queue Volume 12, Issue 10

Development

October 2014

24 pages

ISSN:1542-7730

EISSN:1542-7749

DOI:10.1145/2685690

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 October 2014

Published in QUEUE Volume 12, Issue 10

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article
Popular
Refereed

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
67,761
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)5,354
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)416

Reflects downloads up to 20 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Chisnall D(2024)How to Design an ISACommunications of the ACM10.1145/364053867:5(60-66)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3640538
Chisnall D(2024)How to Design an ISAQueue10.1145/363944521:6(27-46)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3639445
Karpowicz MArabas PNiewiadomska-Szynkiewicz E(2018)Design and implementation of energy-aware application-specific CPU frequency governors for the heterogeneous distributed computing systemsFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2016.05.01178(302-315)Online publication date: Jan-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2016.05.011
Barbalace AIliopoulos ARauchfuss HBrasche G(2017)It's Time to Think About an Operating System for Near Data Processing ArchitecturesProceedings of the 16th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems10.1145/3102980.3102990(56-61)Online publication date: 7-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3102980.3102990

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Magazine Site

View this article on the magazine site (external)

Magazine Site

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Demo: Atlas Thing Architecture: Enabling Mobile Apps as Things in the IoT

A pattern for a Secure IoT Thing

Buddy Thing: Browsing as a Service for the Internet of Things

Comments

Information

Published In

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View options

PDF

eReader

Magazine Site

Login options

Full Access

Figures

Other

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media

Affiliations