Abstract
This paper presents Xetal-Pro SIMD processor, which is based on Xetal-II, one of the most computational-efficient (in terms of GOPS/Watt) processors available today. Xetal-Pro supports ultra wide VDD scaling from nominal supply to the sub-threshold region. Although aggressive VDD scaling causes severe throughput degradation, this can be compensated by the nature of massive parallelism in the Xetal family. The predecessor of Xetal-Pro, Xetal-II, includes a large on-chip frame memory (FM), which cannot operate reliably at ultra low voltage. Therefore we investigate both different FM realizations and memory organization alternatives. We propose a hybrid memory architecture which reduces the non-local memory traffic and enables further VDD scaling. Compared to Xetal-II operating at nominal voltage, we could gain more than 10× energy reduction while still delivering a sufficiently high throughput of 0.69 GOPS (counting multiply and add operations only). This work gives a new insight to the design of ultra-low energy SIMD processors, which are suitable for portable streaming applications.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 47th ACM/EEE int. conference on design automation DAC'10 |
Pages | 543-548 |
Publication status | Published - 2010 |
Event | conference; DAC 2010, 2010-06-13; 2010-06-16, Anaheim, CA, USA - Duration: 13 Jun 2010 → 16 Jun 2010 |
Conference
Conference | conference; DAC 2010, 2010-06-13; 2010-06-16, Anaheim, CA, USA |
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Period | 13/06/10 → 16/06/10 |
Other | DAC 2010, Anaheim, USA |