I come from an electronics background. I know that there are three types of impl

Question

I come from an electronics background. I know that there are three types of implementations of multithreading (see Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 5th Edition):

Fine-grain multithreading issues instructions for different threads after every cycle.

Coarse-grain multithreading only switches to issue instructions from another thread when the current executing thread causes some long latency events (like page fault etc.)

Simultaneous multithreading issues multiple instructions from multiple threads in one cycle. The processor must be superscalar to do so.

Does that mean that SMT is an extension of fine-grain and coarse-grain multithreading, and fine-grain and coarse-grain multithreading are only suitable for single core processor?

What is the exact difference between SMT and the other approaches?

Explanation / Answer

Hennessy and Patterson (Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach) use the term "multithreading" to refer to running more than one thread on a single core.

Their distinction between "fine-grain", "coarse-grain" and "simultaneous" involves different approaches for how the threads share the issue logic (the logic that moves instructions from the decode pipeline stage to the execute pipeline stage.)

In "coarse-grain multithreading" the issue stage will issue instructions from one thread for many cycles (dozens or hundreds) and then switch to issuing from another thread only when the first thread gets a cache miss or some other long-latency operation.

In "fine-grain multithreading" the issue stage can issue instructions from a different thread each cycle, but all the instructions issued together in a cycle must come from the same thread.

In "simultaneous multithreading" the issue stage can issue instructions from different threads in the same cycle. The restriction is lifted that instructions issued together in the same cycle must come from the same thread. The distinction between fine-grain multithreading and simultaneous multithreading only matters on machines that can simultaneously issue two or more instructions.

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