Adaptive balanced computing (ABC) microprocessor using reconfigurable functional caches (RFCs)

Abstract

A general-purpose computing processor performs a wide range of functions. Although the performance of general-purpose processors has been steadily increasing, certain software technologies like multimedia and digital signal processing applications demand ever more computing power. If the computing resources are variable to the needs of an application, a better performance can be achieved. Adaptive Balanced Computing (ABC) performs a dynamic resource configuration of on-chip cache memory by converting the cache into a specialized computing unit. With a small amount of additional logic and slightly modified microarchitecture, a part of the cache memory can be configured to perform specialized computations in a conventional processor. In this paper, we evaluate the ABC using RFCs in various cache organizations to see the impact of resource reconfiguration. The simulations with multimedia and DSP applications show that the resource configuration speedups ranging from 1.04X to 3.94X in overall applications and from 2.61X to 27.4X in the core computations.