One-Instruction Set Computer-Based Multicore Processors for Energy-Efficient Streaming Data Processing

Abstract

For architecture designs, flexibility of application-dependent optimization for better performance and energy-efficiency and productivity enhanced by application-independent versatility and reusability are both crucial but contradicting issues. In the IoT era, due to a more stringent energy constraint and more application diversity, such issues are becoming more difficult to satisfy. Even recent embedded processors prioritize the design-productivity over flexibility, leading to a lot of energy waste in unused resources for some applications. This paper proposes novel multicore processors to address the above two issues. Our processors are composed of application-independent tiny cores and application-dependent optimizable inter-core communications, which efficiently execute applications on a large amount of streaming data, in a pipeline manner. In this work, we utilize one of the simplest RISC processors, One-Instruction Set Computer (OISC), as a core. Our evaluation demonstrates that our processors outperform an existing RISC processor in terms of performance (throughput) and energy-efficiency, while having sufficient scalability, for two different types of applications.