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	The computer market Three major sectors Desktop: ranges from low-end PCs to high-end workstations; market trend is very sensitive to price-performance ratio Server: used in large-scale computing or service-oriented market such as heavy-weight scientific computing, databases, web services, etc; reliability, availability and scalability are very important; servers are normally designed for high throughput Embedded: fast growing sector; very price-sensitive; present in most day-to-day appliances such as microwave ovens, washing machines, printers, network switches, palmtops, cell phones, smart cards, game engines; software is usually specialized/tuned for one particular system The applications Very different in three sectors This difference is the main reason for different design styles in these three areas Desktop market demands leading-edge microprocessors, high-performance graphics engines; must offer balanced performance for a wide range of applications; customers are happy to spend a reasonable amount of money for high performance i.e. the metric is price-performance Server market integrates high-end microprocessors into scalable multiprocessors; throughput is very important; could be floating-point or graphics or transaction throughput Embedded market adopts high-end microprocessor techniques paying immense attention to low price and low power; processors are either general purpose (to some extent) or application-specific Parallel architecture Collection of processing elements that co-operate to solve large problems fast Design questions that need to be answered How many processing elements (scalability)? How capable is each processor (computing power)? How to address memory (shared or distributed)? How much addressable memory (address bit allocation)? How do the processors communicate (through memory or by messages)? How do the processors avoid data races (synchronization)? How do you answer all these to achieve highest performance within your cost envelope?