Analysis of technology trends: making a case for architectural adaptation in custom datapaths

摘要

Abstract: The paper presents an analysis of technology trends based on the data available from the recently released National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (NTRS 1997). This analysis shows that increasing clock rates and system diameter in clock periods will make efficient management of communication and coordination increasingly critical. Due to the decreasing cost of logic versus interconnect and the electrical necessity of signal regeneration to counter worsening effect of interconnect geometries, use of configurable logic blocks even in custom data-paths presents a unique opportunity to customize bindings, mechanisms, and policies which comprise the interaction of processing, memory, I/O and communication resources. This programming flexibility, or `customizability,' can provide the key to achieving robust high performance. We use the results of this study to make a case for evolution of computer architectures into `Application Adaptive' (AA) architectures. These architectures exploit the capability of the underlying hardware to reconfigure logic to achieve system-level cost/performance goals by extensive analysis and profiling of application data and runtime characteristics. A key distinction made by AA architectures against traditional custom-computing machines is that architectural flexibility is used to customize architectural mechanisms and policies (instead of building additional functional resources - an approach commonly adopted by custom computing machines). Thus relatively small amounts of reconfigurable circuit blocks can be leveraged to yield high performance on a per application basis.!16