- Abstract:
-
Customised processor performance generally increases as additional custom instructions are added. However, performance is not the only metric that modern systems must take into account; die area and energy efficiency are equally important. Resource sharing during synthesis of instruction set extensions (ISEs) can reduce significantly the die area and energy consumption of a customised processor. This may increase the number of custom instructions that can be synthesised with a given area budget. Resource sharing involves combining the graph representations of two or more ISEs which contain a similar sub-graph. This coupling of multiple sub-graphs, if performed naively, can increase the latency of the extension instructions considerably. And yet, as we show in this paper, an appropriate level of resource sharing provides a significantly simpler design with only modest increases in average latency for extension instructions.
Based on existing resource-sharing techniques, this study presents a new heuristic that controls the degree of resource sharing between a given set of custom instructions.
Our main contributions are the introduction of a parametric method for exploring the trade-offs that can be achieved between instruction latency and implementation complexity, and the coupling of design-space exploration with fast area-delay models for the operators comprising each ISE. We present experimental evidence that our heuristic exposes a broad range of design points, allowing advantageous trade-offs between die area and latency to be found and exploited.
- Links To Paper
- Publisher's website
- Bibtex format
- @InProceedings{EDI-INF-RR-1304,
- author = {
Gloria Marcela Zuluaga Agudelo
and Nigel Topham
},
- title = {Resource Sharing in Custom Instruction Set Extensions},
- book title = {6th IEEE Symposium on Application Specific Processors},
- publisher = {IEEE},
- year = 2008,
- month = {Jun},
- pages = {7-13},
- doi = {10.1109/SASP.2008.4570779},
- url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4570779},
- }
|