Optimizing Instruction-set Extensible Processors under Data Bandwidth Constraints

The authors present a methodology for generating optimized architectures for data bandwidth constrained extensible processors. The authors describe a scalable integer linear programming (ILP) formulation, that extracts the most profitable set of instruction-set extensions given the available data bandwidth and transfer latency. Unlike previous approaches, the authors differentiate between number of inputs and outputs for instruction-set extensions and the number of register file ports. This differentiation makes the approach applicable to architectures that include architecturally visible state registers and dedicated data transfer channels. The authors support a comprehensive design space exploration to characterize the area/performance trade-offs for various applications. The authors evaluate our approach using actual ASIC implementations to demonstrate that our automatically customized processors meet timing within the target silicon area. For an embedded processor with only two register read ports and one register write port, the authors obtain up to 4.3times speed-up with extensions incurring only a 35% area overhead