Inter-cluster communication models for clustered VLIW processors

Clustering is a well-known technique to improve the implementation of single register file VLIW processors. Many previous studies in clustering adhere to an inter-cluster communication means in the form of copy operations. This paper, however, identifies and evaluates five different inter-cluster communication models, including copy operations, dedicated issue slots, extended operands, extended results, and broadcasting. Our study reveals that these models have a major impact on performance and implementation of the clustered VLIW. We found that copy operations executed in regular VLIW issue slots significantly constrain the scheduling freedom of regular operations. For example, in the dense code for our four cluster machine the total cycle count overhead reached 46.8% with respect to the unicluster architecture, 56% of which are caused by the copy operation constraint. Therefore, we propose to use other models (e.g. extended results or broadcasting), which deliver higher performance than the copy operation model at the same hardware cost.