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A Low-Energy Wide SIMD Architecture with Explicit Datapath

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Abstract

Energy efficiency has become one of the most important topics in computing. To meet the ever increasing demands of the mobile market, the next generation of processors will have to deliver a high compute performance at an extremely limited energy budget. Wide single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) architectures provide a promising solution, as they have the potential to achieve high compute performance at a low energy cost. We propose a configurable wide SIMD architecture that utilizes explicit datapath techniques to further optimize energy efficiency without sacrificing computational performance. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed architecture, multiple instantiations of the proposed wide SIMD architecture and its automatic bypassing counterpart, as well as a baseline RISC processor, are implemented. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed architecture is efficient and scalable in terms of area, performance, and energy. In a 128-PE SIMD processor, the proposed architecture is able to achieve an average of 206 times speed-up and reduces the total energy dissipation by 48.3 % on average and up to 94 %, compared to a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processor. Compared to the corresponding SIMD architecture with automatic bypassing, an average of 64 % of all register file accesses is avoided by the 128-PE, explicitly bypassed SIMD. For total energy dissipation, an average of 27.5 %, and maximum of 43.0 %, reduction is achieved.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands, project EVA PID07121, and the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, project NEST 10346.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Luc Waeijen, Dongrui She, Henk Corporaal & Yifan He

  2. Recore Systems B.V., Enschede, The Netherlands

    Yifan He

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  1. Luc Waeijen
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  2. Dongrui She
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  3. Henk Corporaal
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  4. Yifan He
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yifan He.

Additional information

This article has been partially presented at the 13th International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation (SAMOS XIII) [29].

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Waeijen, L., She, D., Corporaal, H. et al. A Low-Energy Wide SIMD Architecture with Explicit Datapath. J Sign Process Syst 80, 65–86 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-014-0950-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-014-0950-8

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