STORM: A Simple Traffic-Optimized Router Microarchitecture for Networks-on-Chip

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) offer a scalable means of on-chip communication for future many-core chips. This work explores NoC router microarchitectures which leverage traffic pattern biases and imbalances to reduce latency and improve throughput. It introduces STORM, a new, low-latency, fair, highth-roughput NoC router design, customized for the traffic seen in a two-dimensional mesh network employing dimension-order routing. Compared to a baseline NoC router with equivalent buffer resources, STORM offers single cycle operation and reduced cycle time (17% less than the baseline on 45nm CMOS). This design yields a higher overall network saturation throughput (13% higher than the baseline) in an 8x8 2D mesh network for uniform random traffic. STORM also reduces packet latencies under realistic workloads by 36% on average.