Frequent value compression in packet-based NoC architectures

The proliferation of chip multiprocessors (CMPs) has led to the integration of large on-chip caches. For scalability reasons, a large on-chip cache is often divided into smaller banks that are interconnected through packet-based network-on-chip (NoC). With increasing number of cores and cache banks integrated on a single die, the on-chip network introduces significant communication latency and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that exploits frequent value compression to optimize the power and performance of NoC. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme reduces the router power by up to 16.7%, with CPI reduction as much as 23.5% in our setting. Comparing to the recent zero pattern compression scheme, the frequent value scheme saves up to 11.0% more router power and has up to 14.5% more CPI reduction. Hardware design of the FV table and its overhead are also presented.