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Application-Specific Processing on a General-Purpose Core via Transparent Instruction Set Customization
Portland,Oregon December 04-December 08
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MICRO.2004.537th Annual IEEE/ACM International Sy ...
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Nathan Clark, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Manjunath Kudlur, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Hyunchul Park, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Scott Mahlke, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Kriszti? Flautner, ARM Ltd., UK
Application-specific instruction set extensions are an effective way of improving the performance of processors. Critical computation subgraphs can be accelerated by collapsing them into new instructions that are executed on specialized function units. Collapsing the subgraphs simultaneously reduces the length of computation as well as the number of intermediate results stored in the register file. The main problem with this approach is that a new processor must be generated for each application domain. While new instructions can be designed automatically, there is a substantial amount of engineering cost incurred to verify and to implement the final custom processor. In this work, we propose a strategy to transparent customization of the core computation capabilities of the processor without changing its instruction set. A congurable array of function units is added to the baseline processor that enables the acceleration of a wide range of data flow subgraphs. To exploit the array, the microarchitecture performs subgraph identification at run-time, replacing them with new microcode instructions to configure and utilize the array. We compare the effectiveness of replacing subgraphs in the fill unit of a trace cache versus using a translation table during decode, and evaluate the tradeoffs between static and dynamic identification of subgraphs for instruction set customization.
Citation:
Nathan Clark, Manjunath Kudlur, Hyunchul Park, Scott Mahlke, Kriszti? Flautner, "Application-Specific Processing on a General-Purpose Core via Transparent Instruction Set Customization," micro, pp.30-40, 37th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'04), 2004
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