A shared-FPU architecture for ultra-low power MPSoCs
Mohammad Reza Kakoee, Igor Loi, Luca Benini · 2013
In this work we propose a shared floating point unit (FPU) architecture for ultra low power (ULP) system on chips operating at near threshold voltage (NTV). Since high-performance FP units (FPUs) are large and complex, but their utilization is relatively low, adding one FPU per each core in a ULP multicore is costly and power hungry. In our approach, we share a few FPUs among all the cores in the system. This increases the utilization of FPUs leading to an energy-efficient design. As a part of our approach, we propose two different FPU allocation techniques: optimal and random.