Measuring the dynamic energy efficiency of FPGAs over processors

This work investigates the dynamic energy efficiency of the parallel execution model of an FPGA and the sequential execution model of a processor, for latency-insensitive applications. We create the temporal implementations (sequential instructions) of the MCNC benchmarks to be executed on a processor that employs a 4LUT as its functional unit. This processor is ~716 times inefficient for dynamic energy than a 4LUT FPGA, mainly due to the large amount of memory (instruction/data) that is required to encode the 4LUT based instructions. The size of the memory (instruction/data) can be reduced by increasing the data-path width and the logic complexity of the ASIC-based functional units of the processor. Particularly, at 64-bit data-path width and when the (instruction/data) memory sizes are reduced to less than ~9% of their corresponding 4LUT-based instructions, the processor with ASIC-based complex functional unit can achieve higher dynamic energy efficiency than the FPGA for MCNC benchmarks.

Measuring the dynamic energy efficiency of FPGAs over processors

This work investigates the dynamic energy efficiency of the parallel execution model of an FPGA and the sequential execution model of a processor, for latency-insensitive applications. We create the temporal implementations (sequential instructions) of the MCNC benchmarks to be executed on a processor that employs a 4LUT as its functional unit. This processor is ~716 times inefficient for dynamic energy than a 4LUT FPGA, mainly due to the large amount of memory (instruction/data) that is required to encode the 4LUT based instructions. The size of the memory (instruction/data) can be reduced by increasing the data-path width and the logic complexity of the ASIC-based functional units of the processor. Particularly, at 64-bit data-path width and when the (instruction/data) memory sizes are reduced to less than ~9% of their corresponding 4LUT-based instructions, the processor with ASIC-based complex functional unit can achieve higher dynamic energy efficiency than the FPGA for MCNC benchmarks.