LAPP: A Low Power Array Accelerator with Binary Compatibility

Recently, reconfigurable architectures are becoming popular to achieve good energy efficiency. In this paper we designed an energy efficient, high-performance accelerator, named Linear Array Pipeline Processor (LAPP). LAPP works to accelerate existing machine code executions to improve performance while maintaining the binary compatibility, instead of using special codes. With its highly reconfigurable feature, LAPP architecture is designed to effectively work with unit gating through a sufficiently long period to conceal the gating penalty, and thereby incurs minimum power consumption for a given workload. Specifically, codes are mapped fixedly onto Functional Unit (FU) array with minimized caches and registers, and they are pipeline executed with data stream. The synthesized results show that the area of a 36-stage LAPP is equal to 9.5 times that of a traditional processor core area. Compared to a Many-Core Processor (MCP) of the same area, an LAPP-simulator based estimation indicates that LAPP can achieve about 10 times the power efficiency for 9 image processing workloads.