Compute Bound or IO Bound?
Applications can either be classified as compute bound or IO bound
- Compute bound means that throwing more floating point units at a problem should reduce execution time
- IO bound means that increasing the IO bandwidth to the processor will reduce execution time
- IO bandwidth can be bandwidth between processors, bandwidth between processors and memory, bandwidth between processors and external IO devices (i.e, disks).
- Tera claims to be able to sustain a load/store every clock cycle, regardless of the location of the data.
- Not many architectures can claim this...