CIExplorer: Microarchitecture-Aware Exploration for Tightly Integrated Custom Instruction
Xiaoyu Hao, Sen Zhang, Liang Qiao, Qingcai Jiang, Jun Shi, Junshi Chen, Hong An, Xulong Tang, Hao Shu, Hong Yuan · 2025
Extending existing architectures with customized instruction extensions is emerging to achieve high performance and energy efficiency for specific applications.Automated discovery of custom instructions (CIs) is well-studied nowadays, which requires exploring combinations of different types and quantities of operations, resulting in a vast search space.However, previous works typically use microarchitectureagnostic cost models, leading to suboptimal CIs that may degrade performance.They leverage graph isomorphism to reduce area overhead, but few of them consider its potential to benefit performance-oriented exploration.To this end, we present CIExplorer, a framework for adaptive CI exploration.