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Reviewer: David Bruce Henderson

For the last 30 years, microprocessors based on a single processor core (uniprocessors) have become faster. However, limitations such as transistor scaling and thermal dissipation have begun to hobble Moore's law-for example, the number of transistors on a single, inexpensive chip doubles every two years. This edited collection provides an overview of the emerging multicore processor technologies that put Moore's law back on track by introducing microprocessors containing multiple processor cores that exploit parallelism. The book can be organized into three broad sections: multicore design considerations, programming innovations for multicores, and case studies. Chapter 1 introduces tiling, a method for constructing a complex microprocessor using multiple copies of a simple processor tile. The chapter details the raw microprocessor as an example of a tiled multicore architecture. Chapter 2 discusses the on-chip communication fabric needed to deliver high bandwidth for inter-core communications. Two case studies of on-chip networks are presented. Chapter 3 concludes multicore design by discussing the balance between using a smaller number of complex cores versus a larger number of simple cores. The impact of these architectural choices on processor performance is discussed. The next section deals with programming for multicores. Chapter 4 introduces speculative multithread architectures, describing techniques of thread-level speculation that can be used to automatically parallelize applications and make effective use of multiple cores. Chapter 5 discusses the design of transactional memory (TM) systems. The key capabilities of TM systems, with both software and hardware implementation options, are covered. The last section looks at multicore processor case studies. Chapter 6 looks at the AMD Opteron family, chapter 7 details the Sun Microsystems Niagara and Niagara 2 processors, and chapter 8 looks at stream processors, including the Imagine, Storm-1, and Merrimac streaming processors. Chapter 9 presents a Cell Broadband Engine case study. The book is a collection of recent relevant papers by researchers in the field of multicore processor technology. It is well edited, the style and format are consistent, and the quality of production is high. There is a simple table of contents and index, typical of an edited collection. The early chapters of the book provide a good general introduction to multicore processor technology. Online Computing Reviews Service