The Impact of Diverse Memory Architectures on Multicore Consumer Software An

Memory architectures need to adapt in order for perfor-mance and scalability to be achieved in software for mul-ticore systems. In this paper, we discuss the impact of tech-niques for scalable memory architectures, especially the use of multiple, non-cache-coherent memory spaces, on the im-plementation and performance of consumer software. Pri-marily, we report extensive real-world experience in this area gained by Codeplay Software Ltd., a software tools company working in the area of compilers for video games and GPU software. We discuss the solutions we use to handle varia-tions in memory architecture in consumer software, and the impact such variations have on software development effort and, consequently, development cost. This paper introduces preliminary findings regarding impact on software, in ad-vance of a larger-scale analysis planned over the next few years. The techniques discussed have been employed suc-cessfully in the development and optimisation of a shipping AAA cross-platform video game. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.1.3 [Concurrent Programming]: Parallel programming ∗ The research leading to these results has received funding from the Euro-pean Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n248481 (PEPPHER Project, www.peppher.eu)