Design and analysis of adaptive processor

Abstract

A new computation model called CACHE (Cache Architecture for Configurable Hardware Engine) is proposed in this paper. This model does not require a dedicated host processor and its software to harness the reconfiguration. Autonomous reconfiguration is performed within a working-set of application datapaths. The CACHE model has lots of side effects; caching, resource allocation and assignment, placement and routing, and defragmentation, with a processing array itself and a special register called a working-set register file. The model aims to reduce three major workloads: (1) the processor and application design workload, (2) runtime resource management and scheduling workload, and (3) reconfiguration workload. In order to reduce these workloads, processor architecture is definitely different from traditional computing model and its microprocessor architecture. There are three major ideas to construct the computing system: (1) an on-chip working-set model mainly in order to control load and store of streams, namely to control traffics introducing overheads, (2) an on-chip deadlock properties model mainly in order to manage resources and to continuously configure datapaths corresponding to a working-set window, (3) a cache memory technique to work for these models, the mechanism is equivalent to the working-set window, and the cache memory's procedure is equivalent to resource request, acquirement, and release of deadlock properties. The first model focuses onto streaming applications, for example vector and matrix operations, filters, and so on, which takes coarser grained operations such as integer operations of C-language. Regarding performance compared with DSPs, that comes from constant throughput across different scale of the applications. In addition, extended model, we call Instant model that automatically generates instance of a datapath, outperforms the DSPs. This paper shows its computation model, architecture, low-level design, and analyses about basic characteristics of the execution.