Energy-Efficient and High Performance CGRA-based Multi-Core Architecture

Abstract

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA)-based multi-core architecture aims at achieving high performance by kernel level parallelism (KLP). However, the existing CGRA-based multi-core architectures suffer from much energy and performance bottleneck when trying to exploit the KLP because of poor resource utilization caused by insufficient flexibility. In this work, we propose a new ring-based sharing fabric (RSF) to boost their flexibility level for the efficient resource utilization focusing on the kernel-stream type of the KLP. In addition, based on the RSF, we introduce a novel inter-CGRA reconfiguration technique for the efficient pipelining of kernel-stream on CGRA-based multi-core architectures. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches improve performance by up to 50.62 times and reduce energy by up to 50.16% when compared with the conventional CGRA-based multi-core architectures.