CSC/ECE 506 Spring 2012/1c dm

Overview

This wiki article explores the Multiple Instruction Single Data architecture of multi processors as classified by Flynn’s Taxonomy. The article starts with a description of Flynn’s Taxonomy and its classification followed by the MISD architecture and its implementation. It also talks about the controversy over the real-world examples of MISD architecture and ends by providing a few more examples of the architecture.

Multi processor Systems

The performance of a single processor system is generally limited by the frequency at which it operates and the amount of Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) it can exploit. The slowdown in the rate of increase in the uni-processor performance arose due to the difficulty in running the processors at higher frequencies and diminishing returns from exploiting ILP. Thus, multiprocessor systems started becoming popular in the applications like servers, graphics intensive tasks, super computers, etc.

A multiprocessor system is the use of two or more processing elements within a single system. Multiple tasks can be executed in parallel on these processing elements depending on the type of the system. The system can have the same kind of processing elements (Homogeneous System) or different kind of processing elements supporting different types of tasks (Heterogeneous System).

Multiprocessor systems are characterized by the number of instruction streams and the number of data streams the system has. Flynn’s Taxonomy gives the characterization of multiprocessor systems.