Parallel custom instruction identification for extensible processors

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 149-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chenglong Xiao ◽  
Shanshan Wang ◽  
Wanjun Liu ◽  
Emmanuel Casseau
Keyword(s):  
Custom Instruction ◽  
Instruction Identification

scholarly journals On the Feasibility and Limitations of Just-in-Time Instruction Set Extension for FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Processors

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariusz Grad ◽  
Christian Plessl
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Computing ◽  
Just In Time ◽  
Use Case ◽  
Instruction Set ◽  
Embedded Computing ◽  
Custom Instruction ◽  
Reconfigurable Processors ◽  
Instruction Set Extension ◽  
Instruction Identification ◽  
Instruction Set Processors

Reconfigurable instruction set processors provide the possibility of tailor the instruction set of a CPU to a particular application. While this customization process could be performed during runtime in order to adapt the CPU to the currently executed workload, this use case has been hardly investigated. In this paper, we study the feasibility of moving the customization process to runtime and evaluate the relation of the expected speedups and the associated overheads. To this end, we present a tool flow that is tailored to the requirements of this just-in-time ASIP specialization scenario. We evaluate our methods by targeting our previously introduced Woolcano reconfigurable ASIP architecture for a set of applications from the SPEC2006, SPEC2000, MiBench, and SciMark2 benchmark suites. Our results show that just-in-time ASIP specialization is promising for embedded computing applications, where average speedups of 5x can be achieved by spending 50 minutes for custom instruction identification and hardware generation. These overheads will be compensated if the applications execute for more than 2 hours. For the scientific computing benchmarks, the achievable speedup is only 1.2x, which requires significant execution times in the order of days to amortize the overheads.

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