Accelerating search and recognition with a TCAM functional unit

Abstract

World data is increasing rapidly, doubling almost every three years[1][2]. To comprehend and use this data effectively, search and recognition (SR) applications will demand more computational power in the future. The inherent speedups that these applications get due to frequency scaling will no longer exist as processor vendors move away from frequency scaling and towards multi-core architectures. Thus, modifications to both the structure of SR applications and current processor architectures are required to meet the computational needs of these workloads. This paper describes a novel hardware acceleration scheme to improve the performance of SR applications. The hardware accelerator relies on Ternary Content-Addressable Memory and some straightforward ISA extensions to deliver a promising speedup of 3.0-4.0 for SR workloads like Template Matching, BLAST, and multi-threaded applications using Software Transactional Memory (STM).