Performance Improvements in Microprocessor Systems Utilizing a Coprocessor Data-Path

The speedups achieved in a generic microprocessor system by employing a high-performance data-path are presented in this work. The data-path acts as a coprocessor that accelerates computational intensive kernel regions thereby increasing the overall performance. It is composed by flexible computational components (FCCs) that can realize any two-level template of primitive operations. The automated coprocessor synthesis method and its integration to a design flow for executing applications on the system is presented. Analytical exploration in respect to the type of the custom data-path and to the microprocessor architecture is performed. The overall application speedups of eight real-life applications, relative to the software execution on the microprocessor, are estimated using the design flow. These speedups range from 1.75 to 3.95, having an average value of 2.72, while the overhead in circuit area is small. A comparison with another high-performance data-path showed that the proposed coprocessor achieves better performance while having smaller area-time products for the generated data-paths