Redundancy is a well-known technique for replacing components with manufacturing defects, improving yield and reducing cost. Previously, most yield improvement strategies utilized redundant components only when another component had failed (i.e., cold spares). However, utilizing hot spares is becoming popular in commercial products (e.g., the NVIDIA Ti GPU series). Hot spares address manufacturing cost when the components are defective; otherwise, they can be used to improve performance in the field. In this paper, we investigate the effect of hot spares on lifetime-chip-performance (LCP) in multi-core single-instruction, multiple-thread (SIMT) processors. We observe that hot sparing is outstandingly effective for specific types of SIMT processor configurations (small and medium systems) and applications (FFT and FILTER), while improving cost and LCP over other configurations and applications as well. For example, hot-sparing can improve LCP more than 75% compared with conventional methods (i.e., cold sparing), on average, for applications that experience significant performance improvement when adding hot spares (e.g., FFT and FILTER). In particular, microarchitectural hot redundant resources (e.g., hot spare lanes) achieve better LCP improvement than conventional architectural redundancies (e.g., hot spare cores).

冗余是一种众所周知的技术，用于更换有制造缺陷的组件，提高产量并降低成本。以前，大多数良率改进策略仅在另一个组件发生故障时才使用冗余组件（即冷备件）。然而，利用热备件在商业产品（例如 NVIDIA Ti GPU 系列）中越来越流行。当组件有缺陷时，热备件可以解决制造成本问题；否则，它们可用于提高现场性能。在本文中，我们研究了热备件对多核单指令多线程 (SIMT) 处理器中的芯片寿命性能 (LCP) 的影响。我们观察到热备用对于特定类型的 SIMT 处理器配置（中小型系统）和应用（FFT 和 FILTER）非常有效，同时与其他配置和应用相比还可以提高成本和 LCP。例如，对于在添加热备件（例如 FFT 和 FILTER）时体验显着性能改进的应用程序，与传统方法（即冷备件）相比，热备件平均可以将 LCP 提高 75% 以上。特别地，微架构热冗余资源（例如热备用通道）比传统架构冗余（例如热备用核心）实现更好的LCP改进。