Federation: RepurposingScalarCoresforOut-of-Order InstructionIssue
David Tarjan, Michael Boyer, Kevin Skadron · 2008
Future SoCs will contain multiple cores. For workloads with significant parallelism, prior work has shown the benefit of many small, multi-threaded, scalar cores. For workloads that require better single-thread performance, a dedicated, larger core can help but comes at a large opportunity cost in the number of scalar cores that could be provisioned instead. This paper proposes a way to repurpose a pair of scalar cores into a 2-way out-of-order issue core with minimal area overhead. “Federating”scalar cores in this way nevertheless achieves comparable performance to a dedicated out-of-order core and dissipates less power as well. CategoriesandSubjectDescriptors C.1.2 [Multiple Data Stream Architectures]: Multipleinstruction-stream, multiple-data-stream processors (MIMD) GeneralTerms