Notifying memories
Kévin Martin, Mostafa Rizk, Martha Johanna Sepúlveda, Jean-Philippe Diguet · 2016
NoC-based architectures overcome the limitations of traditional buses by exploiting parallelism and offer large bandwidths. NoC adoption also increases communication latency, which is especially penalising for data-flow applications (DF). We introduce the notifying memories (NM) concept to reduce this overhead. Our original approach eliminates useless memory requests. This paper demonstrates NM in the context of video coding applications implemented with dynamic DF. We have conducted cycle accurate systemC simulation of the NoC on an MPEG4 decoder to evaluate NM efficiency. The results show significant reductions in terms of latency (78%), injection rate (60%), and power savings (49%) along with throughput improvement (16%).