Introduction of Architecturally Visible Storage in Instruction Set Extensions
Additional information
Authors
Biswas P.,
Dutt N. D.,
Pozzi L.,
Ienne P.
Type
Journal Article
Year
2007
Language
English
Abstract
Instruction set extensions (ISEs) can be used effectively to accelerate the performance of embedded processors. The critical and difficult task of ISE selection is often performed manually by designers. A few automatic methods for ISE generation have shown good capabilities but are still limited in the handling of memory accesses, and so they fail to directly address the memory wall problem. We present here the first ISE identification technique that can automatically identify state-holding application-specific functional units (AFUs) comprehensively, thus being able to eliminate a large portion of memory traffic from cache and the main memory. Our cycle-accurate results obtained by the SimpleScalar simulator show that the identified AFUs with architecturally visible storage gain significantly more than previous techniques and achieve an average speedup of 2.8times over pure software execution with a little area overhead. Moreover, the number of required memory-access instructions is reduced by two thirds on average, suggesting corresponding benefits on energy consumption
Keywords
Acceleration, Application software, Application specific integrated circuits, application-specific functional units, application-specific processors, architecturally visible storage, cache storage, embedded processors, embedded systems, Energy consumption, Energy efficiency, Hardware, Helium, Informatics, instruction set extensions, instruction set extensions (ISEs), instruction sets, integrated circuit design, integrated memory circuits, ISE identification technique, low-power electronics, memory traffic, memory-access instructions, microprocessor chips, Process design, Time to market, Traffic control
Number ( Month )
3
Volume
26
Journal
Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on
Pages (or article number)
435-446
ISSN
0278-0070
