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Software/Hardware Interface for Multicore/Manycore (SHIM) processors

Defines an architecture description useful for software design
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Description

SHIM’s primary goal is to define an architecture description standard useful for software design. Some architectural features that SHIM describes are the hardware topology including processor cores, accelerators, memory/caches and inter-core communication channels, with selected details of each element, and instruction, memory, and communication performance information. While the SHIM standard is publicly available, the vendor-specific information can remain confidential between a processor vendor and its development tool partners.

The SHIM standard is beneficial for many types of tools, including performance estimation, system configuration, and hardware modeling. Performance information is critical for most software development tools, including performance analysis tools and auto-parallelizing compilers. Basic architectural information for system configuration could be used by operating systems, middleware, and other runtime libraries. In addition, the SHIM standard can be used with hardware modeling to support architecture exploration.

First release – February 12th 2015

SHIM is available from the Multicore Association.