YHFT-QDSP: High-Performance Heterogeneous Multi-Core DSP

Abstract

Multi-core architectures are widely used to enhance the microprocessor performance within a limited increase in time-to-market and power consumption of the chips. Toward the application of high-density data signal processing, this paper presents a novel heterogeneous multi-core architecture digital signal processor (DSP), YHFT-QDSP, with one RISC CPU core and 4 VLIW DSP cores. By three kinds of interconnection, YHFT-QDSP provides high efficiency message communication for inner-chip RISC core and DSP cores, inner-chip and inter-chip DSP cores. A parallel programming platform is specifically developed for the heterogeneous multi-core architecture of YHFT-QDSP. This parallel programming environment provides a parallel support library and a friendly interface between high level application softwares and multicore DSP. The 130 nm CMOS custom chip design results in a high speed and moderate power design. The results of typical benchmarks show that the interconnection structure of YHFT-QDSP is much better than other related structures and achieves better speedup when using the interconnection facilities in combing methods. YHFT-QDSP has been signed off and manufactured presently. The future applications of the multi-core chip could be found in 3G wireless base station, high performance radar, industrial applications, and so on.

Breaking the performance bottleneck of sparse matrix-vector multiplication on SIMD processors

“…We build a cycle-accurate simulator based on our previous single-core simulator [6] for the SIMD architecture. The SIMD pipeline simulation is combined with a cycle-driven memory system simulation that models the multi-banked memory, which is organized as scratchpad memory.…”

A Fine-Grained Pipelined Implementation of LU Decomposition on SIMD Processors

“…We have implemented a cycle-accurate simulator FT-Matrix-Sim based on our previous single-core simulator [20] for the SIMD architecture as shown in Fig. 1.…”

The Godson Processors: Its Research, Development, and Contributions

“…Over the past decade, China has made great achievements in developing advanced microprocessors that meet the requirements of both civilian and security applications. Benefited from the intensive investment of Chinese government in the 10th and 11th Five-Year Plans (2001∼2010), Chinese researchers have developed several series of microprocessors, including the Godson processors designed by the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) [1][2][3][4][5][6] , the UniCore/PKUnity processors designed by the Peking University [7] , the YHFT processors designed by the National University of Defense Technology [8] , the Shenwei processors developed by National High Performance IC (Shanghai) Design Center [9] and so on. Currently, China has become one of the few countries that are capable of designing general-purpose microprocessors.…”