Design considerations for adding parallel units
Single processor
- over-burdened - not enough remaining cycles to compute
- raw performance - process just not powerful enough
- timing/complexity - communication/computation difficult in sw
System complexity
- increase: more chips usually means more complicated/expensive
- decrease: abstractions simplify design
Power
- increase
- more chips/wires possibly more power
- decrease
- high performance chip vs. many low performance
- “sleep” non-active components