Design Considerations for Chip Multi Threading Systems Parminder Grewal*, Abhishek Tripathi**

Abstract- Over the last few years, processor companies have moved from single threaded processors to chip multi-threaded processors. This change has been driven by factors such as thermal dissipation and need to mask memory accesses given the wide difference in memory and processor speeds. In fact as per Intel's estimates, at the end of 2007 about 80 percent of their desktop processor sales and nearly 100 percent of their server processor sales were chip multi-threaded. Though chip multi-threaded processors have become common, present operating systems are built for single threaded processors and thus are not able to make full use of the better processors. To fully utilize the compute density of these processors, some changes are needed in the operating system design, especially in the use of limited resources like L2 cache