Limited bandwidth to affect processor design

This paper quantifies and compares the performance impacts of memory latencies and finite bandwidth. We show that the implementation of aggressive latency tolerance techniques aggravates stalls due to finite memory bandwidth, which actually become more significant than stalls resulting from uncongested memory latency alone. We expect that memory bandwidth limitations across the processor pins will drive significant architectural change. An execution-driven simulation measures the time that several SPEC95 benchmarks spend stalled for memory latency, limited-memory bandwidth and computing.