ParallAX

Future interactive entertainment applications will featurethe physical simulation of thousands of interacting objectsusing explosions, breakable objects, and cloth effects. Whilethese applications require a tremendous amount of performanceto satisfy the minimum frame rate of 30 FPS, there is a dramatic amount of parallelism in future physics workloads.How will future physics architectures leverage parallelismto achieve the real-time constraint?. We propose and characterize a set of forward-looking benchmarksto represent future physics load and explore the designspace of future physics processors. In response to thedemand of this workload, we demonstrate an architecturewith a set of powerful cores and caches to provide performancefor the serial and coarse-grain parallel components ofphysics simulation, along with a exible set of simple coresto exploit fine-grain parallelism. Our architecture combinesintelligent, application-aware L2 management with dynamiccoupling/allocation of simple cores to complex cores. Furthermore,we perform sensitivity analysis on interconnectalternatives to determine how tightly to couple these cores.