Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips

1.3. Why MPSoCS?

The typical MPSoC is a heterogeneous multiprocessor: there may be several different types of PEs, the memory system may be heterogeneously distributed around the machine, and the interconnection network between the PEs and the memory may also be heterogeneous. MPSoCs often require large amounts of memory. The device may have embedded memory on-chip as well as relying on off-chip commodity memory.

We introduced two examples of SoCs in the last section and they implement, in fact, heterogeneous multiprocessors. In contrast, most scientific multiprocessors today are much more regular than the typical MPSoC. Figure 1-3 shows the traditional view of a shared-memory multiprocessor [2]—a pool of processors and a pool of memory are connected ...