Shared reconfigurable fabric for multi-core customization

Processor customization in the form of application specific instructions can provide significant power and performance boost to an embedded application while maintaining high flexibility. The emergence of multi-core architectures opens up the possibility of creating an application-specific heterogeneous computing platform by customizing a set of homogeneous cores. We propose a multi-core architecture where the cores share a reconfigurable fabric that accommodates the custom instructions. We develop an efficient algorithm that exploits this shared fabric through customization and runtime reconfiguration to minimize the execution time of multi-threaded applications. Experimental results reveal that shared reconfigurable fabric helps applications achieve substantial speedup compared to per-core private fabrics.