Boosting single thread performance in mobile processors via reconfigurable acceleration

Abstract

Mobile processors, a subclass of embedded processors, are increasingly employing multicore designs to improve performance. This often requires sacrificing resources in each CPU, degrading single thread performance which is still important according to Amdahl's law. The traditional technique for efficiently boosting serial performance in embedded processors, dedicated hardware acceleration, is unsuitable for modern mobile processors because of the heterogeneity and the diversity of applications they run. This paper proposes 'general purpose' accelerators, reconfigured on an application-by-application basis, as a means of increasing single thread performance. These accelerators are placed within the datapath of CPUs and support dynamic compilation. This paper presents the design of an architecture with such accelerators and evaluates the cost/performance implications of the design. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.