With the advent of manycore architecture, on-chip interconnect connects a number of cores, caches, memory modules, accelerators, graphic processing unit (GPU) or chiplets in one system. However, on-chip interconnect architecture consumes a significant portion of total parallel computing chip power. Power-gating is an effective technique to reduce power consumption by powering off the routers, but it suffers from a large wake-up latency to resume the full activity of routers. Recent research aims to improve the wake-up latency penalty by hiding it through early wake-up techniques. However, these techniques do not exploit the full advantage of power-gating due to the early wake-up. Consequently, they do not achieve significant power savings. The present invention provides a new router architecture that remedies the large wake-up latency overheads while providing significant power savings. The invention takes advantage of a simple switch to transmit packets without waking up the router. Additionally, the technique hides the wake-up latency by continuing to provide packet transmission during the wake-up phase.
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