Network-on-Chip Architectures: A Holistic Design Exploration

[2]. The Cell Processor from Sony, Toshiba and IBM (STI) [3], and the Sun UltraSPARC T1 (formerly codenamed Niagara) [4] signal the growing popularity of such systems. Furthermore, Intel’s very recently announced 80—core TeraFLOP chip [5] exemplifies the irreversible march toward many—core systems with tens or even hundreds of processing elements. 1.2 The Dawn of the Communication—Centric Revolution The multi—core thrust has ushered the gradual displacement of the computati— centric design ...