Title :
A HW/SW Co-designed Programmable Functional Unit
Author :
Deb, Abhishek ; Codina, Josep Maria ; González, Antonio
Author_Institution :
Univ. Politec. de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Abstract :
In this paper, we propose a novel programmable functional unit (PFU) to accelerate general purpose application execution on a modern out-of-order x86 processor. Code is transformed and instructions are generated that run on the PFU using a co-designed virtual machine (Cd-VM). Results presented in this paper show that this HW/SW co-designed approach produces average speedups in performance of 29% in SPECFP and 19% in SPECINT, and up-to 55%, over modern out-of-order processor.
Keywords :
hardware-software codesign; hw/sw co-designed; programmable functional unit; virtual machine; Computer architecture; Interface states; Load modeling; Microarchitecture; Programmable functional units; Registers; Hardware/software interfaces; Micro-architecture implementation considerations; Processor Architectures;
Journal_Title :
Computer Architecture Letters
DOI :
10.1109/L-CA.2011.23
