Dynamic Reallocation of Functional Units in Superscalar Processors

Autor:	Paolo Ienne, Daniel Mlynek, Marc Epalza
Rok vydání:	2004
Předmět:	Logic synthesis Process (engineering) Very long instruction word Computer science Circuit design Distributed computing Superscalar Reconfigurable Computing Reconfigurability Control reconfiguration Context (language use) Reconfigurable computing Reservation station
Zdroj:	Advances in Computer Systems Architecture ISBN: 9783540230038 Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference
DOI:	10.1007/978-3-540-30102-8_16
Popis:	In the context of general-purpose processing, an increasing number of diverse functional units are added to cover a wide spectrum of applications. However, it is still possible to design custom logic adapted to a particular application that will perform far better than a processor. In an attempt to give it some adaptability, adding some reconfigurability can help improve performance. We propose to extend the possibilities of complex multifunction units by dynamically reallocating existing complex functional units as multiple simpler units. The fact that more than one simple unit is involved in the ”reconfiguration” process implies that the decision is more global and needs to be taken for a longer period of time. We show that in typical superscalar architectures, there are no major impediments to implementing such a decision scheme, and that on a specific reallocation opportunity we can achieve speedups of up to 56% over a mainstream superscalar processor and practically no losses.
Databáze:	OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz:	https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_dedup___::52ed83e34d1fb0399043326db34819dc https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30102-8_16 Zobrazit plný text záznamu