The Raw Processor: A Composeable 32-Bit Fabric for Embedded and General Purpose Computing
Michael Bedford Taylor, Jason Z. Kim, Jason Miller, Fae Ghodrat, Ben Greenwald, P. V. Johnson, Walter C. Lee, Albert Ma, Nathan Shnidman, David Wentzlaff, Matt Frank, Saman P. Amarasinghe, Anant K. Agarwal · 2001
The Raw project is attempting to create a scalable proces-sor architecture that is suitable for both general purpose and embedded computations. Current general purpose pro-cessors differ from embedded devices in that they provide large amounts of hardware support to discover and manipu-late instruction-level parallelism and unstructured memory accesses. Because the parallelism in embedded computa-tions is much more predictable, embedded devices such as DSPs do not offer a rich set of mechanisms, rather they de-vote their area to computational resources such as pipelined floating point, thereby achieving significantly better area and energy efficiency. However, their best performance is achieved for regular data access patterns such as streams, and they often require assembly code manipulation. Em-bedded FPGAs and ASICs go one step further, and can of-