Authors: Michalis D Galanis Gregory Dimitroulakos Costas E Goutis
Publish Date: 2007/03/02
Volume: 39, Issue: 3, Pages: 251-271
Abstract
The speedups achieved in a generic microprocessor system by employing a highperformance datapath are presented The datapath acts as a coprocessor that accelerates time critical code segments called kernels thereby increasing the overall performance The datapath has been previously introduced by the authors and it is composed by Flexible Computational Components FCCs that can realize any twolevel template of primitive operations A design flow integrating the automated coprocessor synthesis method for executing applications on the system is presented For evaluating the effectiveness of our coprocessor approach analytical exploration in respect to the type of the custom datapath and to the microprocessor architecture is performed The kernel and the overall application speedups of six reallife applications relative to the software execution on the microprocessor are estimated using the design flow Kernel speedups up to 155 are achieved that result in an average overall improvement of 278 with a small overhead in circuit area The design flow achieved the acceleration of the applications near to theoretical bounds A comparison with another highperformance datapath showed that the proposed coprocessor achieves better performance while having smaller areatime products for the generated datapaths
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