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Summary: Leveraging Optical Technology in Future
Bus-based Chip Multiprocessors
Nevin Kirman Meyrem Kirman Rajeev K. Dokania Jos´e F. Mart´inez
Alyssa B. Apsel Matthew A. Watkins David H. Albonesi
Computer Systems Laboratory
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853 USA
http://csl.cornell.edu/
ABSTRACT
Although silicon optical technology is still in its formative
stages, and the more near-term application is chip-to-chip
communication, rapid advances have been made in the de-
velopment of on-chip optical interconnects. In this paper,
we investigate the integration of CMOS-compatible optical
technology to on-chip cache-coherent buses in future CMPs.
While not exhaustive, our investigation yields a hierarchi-
cal opto-electrical system that exploits the advantages of op-
tical technology while abiding by projected limitations. Our
evaluation shows that, for the applications considered, com-
pared to an aggressive all-electrical bus of similar power and
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