Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) Accelerator for the FlexCore Processor

A proven approach to increase performance of general-purpose processors is to add hardware accelerators. In its basic configuration, the FlexCore processor has a limited set of datapath units. But thanks to a flexible datapath interconnect and a wide control word, the FlexCore datapath is explicitly designed to support integration of special units that, on demand, can accelerate certain data-intensive applications. We present the integration of a versatile accelerator for several Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) keys. Furthermore, we investigate the accelerator´s impact on processor execution time and energy efficiency, using the Power Stone CRC benchmark. Our evaluation shows that the accelerated 65-nm 2.7-ns FlexCore datapath is, for example, 86% more energy and cycle efficient than a datapath lacking the CRC accelerator.