Construction and exploitation of VLIW ASIPs with heterogeneous vector-widths

摘要

Numerous applications in important domains, such as communication and multimedia, show a significant data-level parallelism (DLP). A large part of the DLP is usually exploited through application vector-ization and implementation of vector operations in processors executing the applications. While the amount of DLP varies between applications of the same domain or even within a single application, processor architectures usually support a single vector width. This may not be optimal and may cause a substantial energy inefficiency. Therefore, an adequate more sophisticated exploitation of DLP is highly relevant. This paper proposes the use of heterogeneous vector widths and a method to explore the heterogeneous vector widths for VLIW ASIPs. In our context, heterogeneity corresponds to the usage of two or more different vector widths in a single ASIP. After a brief explanation of the target ASIP architecture model, the paper describes the vector-width exploration method and explains the associated design automation tools. Subsequently, experimental results are discussed.