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Increasing data-bandwidth to instruction-set extensions through register clustering

Published: 05 November 2007 Publication History

Abstract

The conflicting requirements of performance and flexibility in today's embedded system market are forcing system designers to use more and more of the so called Configurable or Customizable processor cores. Such processors tend to meet the demanding performance constraints by accommodating application specific Instruction-Set Extensions (ISEs) which have, naturally, become a vital component of current processor customization flows. One major bottleneck in maximizing ISE performance is the limitation on the data-bandwidth between the General Purpose Register(GPR) file and the ISEs. For improved performance, it is desirable to have a large data-bandwidth from the GPRs to ISEs. However, the tight area constraints of modern embedded processors often restrict the GPR I/O of ISEs to save port area of the register files. This paper presents a novel approach to increase the GPR I/O of ISEs without significantly increasing the size of the GPR files. This is achieved by applying the concept of register clustering, common in many VLIW architectures, to single-issue processors with high performance ISEs. Such clustering often causes extra register moves in compiled code. This work also presents an algorithm to minimize such register moves. The benchmark results presented in this paper show that our solution can significantly reduce the area overhead of many-port GPR files without sacrificing the performance improvements through ISEs.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICCAD '07: Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
November 2007
933 pages
ISBN:1424413826
  • General Chair:
  • Georges Gielen

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IEEE Press

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Published: 05 November 2007

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ICCAD '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 139 of 510 submissions, 27%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 457 of 1,762 submissions, 26%

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  • (2015)OPLEACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/276445814:4(1-23)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2015
  • (2014)Virtual Ways: Low-Cost Coherence for Instruction Set Extensions with Architecturally Visible StorageACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO)10.1145/257687711:2(1-26)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2014
  • (2013)Ingredients of adaptabilityVLSI Design10.1155/2013/6836152013(10-10)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2013
  • (2013)An energy-efficient method of supporting flexible special instructions in an embedded processor with compact ISAACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/2509420.250942610:3(1-25)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2013
  • (2012)Energy efficient special instruction support in an embedded processor with compact isaProceedings of the 2012 international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems10.1145/2380403.2380430(131-140)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2012
  • (2010)Virtual waysProceedings of the 5th international conference on High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers10.1007/978-3-642-11515-8_11(126-140)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2010
  • (2009)Memory organization and data layout for instruction set extensions with architecturally visible storageProceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.1145/1687399.1687527(689-696)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2009
  • (2009)Way StealingProceedings of the 46th Annual Design Automation Conference10.1145/1629911.1629923(31-36)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2009
  • (2009)Design-space exploration of resource-sharing solutions for custom instruction set extensionsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2009.202635528:12(1788-1801)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2009
  • (2008)A design flow for architecture exploration and implementation of partially reconfigurable processorsIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.5555/1515843.151584716:10(1281-1294)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2008

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