Dynamic hardware specialization-using moore´s bounty without burning the chip down

Summary form only given. The era of faster, smaller, greener (more power efficient) transistors in every successive generation appears to be dead. Due to slowing voltage scaling power has becoming a primary design constraint. Using conventional microprocessor techniques does not provide performance improvements without excessive power consumption. Instead, processor architects and microarchitects are going to be partially burdened with power-efficiently and energy-efficiently improving performance with technology scaling providing density improvements “alone”. The DySER project investigates ways for dynamically specializing datapaths to energy-efficiently improve performance. DySER attempts to provide a truly general purpose accelerator, avoiding radical changes to software development, ISA, or microarchitecture. The DySER accelerator is based on three principles: i) Exploit frequently executed, specializable code regions. ii) Dynamically configure the DySER accelerator hardware for particular regions. iii) Integrate the accelerator tightly, but non-intrusively, to a processor pipeline.We have completed a full prototype implementation of DySER integrated into the OpenSPARC processor (called SPARCDySER), a co-designed compiler in LLVM, and a detailed performance evaluation on an FPGA system, which runs an Ubuntu Linux distribution and full applications. Through the prototype, we evaluate the fundamental principles of DySER acceleration, namely: exploiting specializable regions, dynamically specializing hardware, and tight processor integration. To this end, we explore the accelerator´s performance, power, and area, and consider comparisons to state-of-the-art microprocessors using energy/performance frontier analysis of both the prototype and simulated DySERaccelerated cores. Compared to the OpenSPARC processor, DySER provides 6.2X performance improvements and 4X energy reduction. DySER´s approach of dynamic specialization is a promising way to add- ess the imminent power challenges.