A High-Performance and Cost-Effective Hardware Merge Sorter without Feedback Datapath

Abstract

We propose a high-performance and cost-effective hardware merge sorter (HMS) without any feedback datapaths in order to develop the fastest hardware sorting accelerator. The operating frequencies of existing HMSs are severely limited by the presence of feedback datapaths. We show the idea of eliminating the feedback datapaths, and propose a concrete architecture adopting the idea and some implementation optimizations. The evaluation results show that our HMS achieves 1.59x throughput improvement with less hardware resources compared to the state-of-the-art HMS.