Harnessing ISA diversity

Abstract

Heterogeneous multicore architectures have the potential for high performance and energy efficiency. These architectures may be composed of small power-efficient cores, large high-performance cores, and/or specialized cores that accelerate the performance of a particular class of computation. Architects have explored multiple dimensions of heterogeneity, both in terms of micro-architecture and specialization. While early work constrained the cores to share a single ISA, this work shows that allowing heterogeneous ISAs further extends the effectiveness of such architectures This work exploits the diversity offered by three modern ISAs: Thumb, x86-64, and Alpha. This architecture has the potential to outperform the best single-ISA heterogeneous architecture by as much as 21%, with 23% energy savings and a reduction of 32% in Energy Delay Product.