Efficient performance scaling of future CGRAs for mobile applications

Abstract

Mobile computing as exemplified by the smart phone has become an integral part of our daily lives. The next generation of these devices will be driven by providing richer user experiences and compelling capabilities: higher definition multimedia, 3D graphics, augmented reality, and voice interfaces. To meet these goals, the core computing capabilities of mobile terminals must be scaled within highly constrained energy budgets. Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) are an appealing hardware platform for mobile systems by providing programmability with the potential for high computational throughput, low cost, and energy efficiency. CGRAs are most commonly used for innermost loops that contain an abundance of instruction-level parallelism. Unfortunately, current CGRAs fail to meet future performance requirements due to their inability to scale. Simply increasing the size of the array is too expensive in terms of power and area. In this paper, we first perform a deep analysis of several mobile applications from the domains of multimedia and gaming. We then explore potential solutions in the context of these applications for scaling the array performance in an energy efficient manner: homogeneous versus heterogeneous functionality, interconnect topologies, simple versus complex processing elements, and scalar versus vector memory support.