Implementation of core coalition on FPGAs

Abstract

Embedded systems increasingly need to support dynamic and diverse application landscape. In response, performance asymmetric multi-cores, comprising of identical instruction-set architecture but micro-Architecturally distinct set of simple and complex cores, have emerged as an attractive alternative to accommodate software diversity. Dynamic heterogeneous multi-core architectures take this concept forward by allowing on-demand formation of virtual asymmetric multi-cores through coalition of physically symmetric simple cores and thus adjust better to workload variation at runtime. In this paper, we present the first hardware implementation of a core coalition architecture and synthesize its functional prototype on FPGAs. © 2013 IEEE.