Advances in semiconductor technology have let microprocessors integrate more than a 100 million transistors on a single chip. The Alpha 21364 microprocessor uses 152 million transistors to integrate an Alpha 21264 processor core, a 1.75-Mbyte second-level cache, cache coherence hardware, two memory controllers, and a multiprocessor router on a single die, as Figure la shows. In the O.18-micron bulk CMOS process, the 21364 will run at 1.2 GHz and provide 12.8 Gbytes/s of local memory bandwidth and 22.4 Gbytes/s of router bandwidth, as Figure 2 shows. The Alpha 21364's tightly coupled multi-processor network connects up to 128 such processors in a 2d torus network; figure 1b shows a 12-processor configuration. A fully configured, 128-processor, shared-memory system can support up to 4 terabytes of disk storage. We could also easily redesign the 21364 to support a much larger configuration.
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