Fine-grain performance scaling of soft vector processors
Peter Yiannacouras, J. Gregory Steffan, Jonathan Rose · 2009
Embedded systems are often implemented on FPGA devices and 25% of the time include a soft processor--a processor built using the FPGA reprogrammable fabric. Because of their prevalence and flexibility, soft processors are compelling targets for customization--although current soft processors provide few architectural variations. Recent work has proposed augmenting soft processors with customizable vector processing support, enabling designers to easily scale performance by exploiting the data parallelism available in an application. However this approach provides only coarse-grain scaling, by successively doubling the number of vector datapaths for less than double the performance.