Exploring Functional Unit Design Space of VLIW Processors for Optimizing Both Performance and Energy Consumption

Author

Pillai, Abhishek ; Zhang, Wei ; Yang, Laurence T.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Southern Illinois Univ. Carbondale, Carbondale, IL

Volume

1

fYear

2007

fDate

21-23 May 2007

Firstpage

792

Lastpage

797

Abstract

The number of functional units can have significant impact on both the performance and energy consumption of VLIW processors. This paper uses a design exploration approach to find optimal integer functional unit configurations for achieving the best EDP (energy delay product) results for different media applications. Our experimental results quantitatively indicate that the optimal number of integer functional units should match the instruction level parallelism that can be extracted from the applications to balance both performance and energy optimally for VLIW processors.

Keywords

instruction sets; multiprocessing systems; parallel architectures; VLIW processors; design exploration; energy consumption; energy delay product; functional unit design space; instruction level parallelism; integer functional unit configurations; Delay; Design engineering; Design optimization; Energy consumption; Energy dissipation; Energy efficiency; Hardware; Power dissipation; Space exploration; VLIW;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops, 2007, AINAW '07. 21st International Conference on

Conference_Location

Niagara Falls, Ont.

Print_ISBN

978-0-7695-2847-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AINAW.2007.179

Filename

4221154