Abstract
A tightly coupled heterogeneous core (TCHC) has heterogeneous execution units with different characteristics inside the core. The composite core (CC) and the front-end execution architecture (FXA) are examples of state-of-the-art TCHCs. These TCHCs have in-order and out-of-order execution units in the core. They selectively execute instructions in-order and it improves the energy efficiency without significant performance degradation compared to out-of-order execution. However, these TCHCs cannot improve the energy efficiency sufficiently. CC has a large switching penalty of the execution units, and thus, CC cannot sufficiently execute instructions in-order. FXA cannot suspend energy consuming out-of-order execution units when it executes instructions in-order. We propose a dual-mode frontend execution architecture (DM-FXA), which is based on the FXA. DM-FXA has our proposed low-power execution mode, which completely suspends the out-of-order execution unit on in-order execution, and thus, DM-FXA consumes less energy than does the FXA. In addition, DM-FXA has a smaller switching penalty than CC. In our evaluation, the proposed methods reduce energy consumption by 34.7% compared with a conventional out-of-order processor, and performance degradation is within 3.2%.
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Notes
- 1.
We use a PER instead of an EDP because it is easy to understand. That is, a larger PER shows better energy efficiency.
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This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 16H05855.
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Chidai, Y., Izuoka, K., Shioya, R., Goshima, M., Ando, H. (2018). A Tightly Coupled Heterogeneous Core with Highly Efficient Low-Power Mode. In: Berekovic, M., Buchty, R., Hamann, H., Koch, D., Pionteck, T. (eds) Architecture of Computing Systems – ARCS 2018. ARCS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10793. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77610-1_16
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