Function-Level Processor (FLP): A High Performance, Minimal Bandwidth, Low Power Architecture for Market-Oriented MPSoCs

Abstract

This letter introduces function-level processors (FLPs) to fill the flexibility/efficiency gap between instruction-level processors (ILPs) and hardware accelerators (HWACCs). Compared to an ILP, an FLP has a coarser programmability at function-level constructed out of configurable function blocks (FBs) implementing market-oriented functions. FBs are connected via a MUX-based programmable interconnect, tuned for envisioned application flows, for realizing flexible macro pipelines. We demonstrate FLP benefits with an industry example of the pipeline-vision processor (PVP). Mapping six embedded vision applications, the PVP offers up to 22.4 GOPs/s with average power of 120 mW; consuming 17x and 6x less power than compared ILP and approaches.Index Terms-Flexibility/efficiency trade-off, function-set architecture (fsa), heterogeneous architectures.

Improving scalability of chip-multiprocessors with many HW accelerators

“…Domain-specific designs provide the capability of adapting the architectures to set of applications to achieve orders of magnitude improvement in power and performance efficiency over general purpose designs [99,15]. For instance Q100 [121] is an example of domain-specific accelerators.…”

“…Function Level Processor (FLP) [99] is another example of domain-specific ACCs that targets streaming applications. FLP boosts performance and power efficiency by customizing the frequently used functions in a target domain and allows data path optimization per function block.…”

“…The natural evolution of this trend will be integration of many diverse and customized ACCs in future designs [91,57], as ITRS predicts it will reach to hundreds and thousands ACCs by 2022 [106]. There is also a significant body of research at different fields of study that call for increasing number of ACCs on chips [91,58,17,15,50,40,2,57,121,116,117,79,124,119,42,103,10,99].…”

“…Kernel, and one example is Functional Level Processor (FLP)[99] that is re-configured to execute specific kernels, and (4) Application, and the main example is Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) that is fixed at design time to execute a specific application. The granularity of communication is similarly defined from high to low:high refers to any-to-any communication among processing units.…”