Shared reconfigurable fabric for multi-core customization

Abstract

Processor customization in the form of application specific instructions can provide significant power and performance boost to an embedded application while maintaining high flexibility. The emergence of multi-core architectures opens up the possibility of creating an application-specific heterogeneous computing platform by customizing a set of homogeneous cores. We propose a multi-core architecture where the cores share a reconfigurable fabric that accommodates the custom instructions. We develop an efficient algorithm that exploits this shared fabric through customization and runtime reconfiguration to minimize the execution time of multi-threaded applications. Experimental results reveal that shared reconfigurable fabric helps applications achieve substantial speedup compared to per-core private fabrics © 2011 ACM.