Characterization of Fixed and Reconfigurable Multi-Core Devices for Application Acceleration
Jason Louis Williams, Chris Massie, Alan D. George, Justin Richardson, Kunal Gosrani, Herman X. Lam · ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems · 2010
As on-chip transistor counts increase, the computing landscape has shifted to multi- and many-core devices. Computational accelerators have adopted this trend by incorporating both fixed and reconfigurable many-core and multi-core devices. As more, disparate devices enter the market, there is an increasing need for concepts, terminology, and classification techniques to understand the device tradeoffs. Additionally, computational performance, memory performance, and power metrics are needed to objectively compare devices. These metrics will assist application scientists in selecting the appropriate device early in the development cycle. This article presents a hierarchical taxonomy of computing devices, concepts and terminology describing reconfigurability, and computational density and internal memory bandwidth metrics to compare devices.