Speedups and Energy Savings of Microprocessor Platforms with a Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Data-Path

This paper presents the performance improvements and the energy reductions by coupling a high-performance coarse-grained reconfigurable data-path with a microprocessor in a generic platform. The datapath has been previously introduced by the authors. It is composed by computational units able to realize complex operations which aid in improving the performance of time critical application parts, called kernels. A design flow is proposed for mapping high-level software descriptions to the microprocessor system. Eight real-life applications are mapped on three different instances of the system. Significant overall application speedups, relative to a software-only solution, ranging from 1.74 to 3.94 are reported being close to theoretical speedup bounds. Average energy savings of 59% are achieved, while the reduction in the system energy-delay product ranges from 66% to 92%.