A multiple stream microprocessor prototype system

A general-purpose multiple-stream processor with shared memory and a single time-multiplexed synchronous bus has been implemented. The AMP-1 system uses eight standard microprocessors and 64K bytes of memory. The design is highly efficient in the use of processor, bus, and memory resources. Preliminary performance measurements agree closely with an analytic memory access conflict model and show extremely low conflict-based performance degradation. Heavy interleaving of the memory and effective multitasking of a job can yield significant performance speedups. Considerations for future implementations are presented.