274 Chapter 5 Multiprocessor Architectures
or phases that communicate with each other, which is a natural and easily
exploitable source of parallelism. Desktop processors rely on instruction-level
parallelism to improve performance, but only a limited amount of instruction-
level parallelism is available in most programs. We can build custom multipro-
cessor architectures that reflect the task-level parallelism available in our
application and meet performance targets at much lower cost and with much
less energy.
5.2.3 Specialization and Multiprocessors
It is the combination of high performance, low power, and real time that drives
us to use multiprocessors. And these requirements lead us further toward heter-
ogeneous multiprocessors, which starkly ...