A survey on hardware accelerators: Taxonomy, trends, challenges, and perspectives

In recent years, the limits of the multicore approach emerged in the so-called “dark silicon” issue and diminishing returns of an ever-increasing core count. Hardware manufacturers, out of necessity, switched their focus to accelerators, a new paradigm that pursues specialization and heterogeneity o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of systems architecture 2022-08, Vol.129, p.102561, Article 102561
Main Authors: Peccerillo, Biagio, Mannino, Mirco, Mondelli, Andrea, Bartolini, Sandro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accelerators
CGRA
Classification
Data-parallel
Domain-Specific Architectures
Future research directions
Machine Learning
Open challenges
PIM
Survey
Taxonomy
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Summary:In recent years, the limits of the multicore approach emerged in the so-called “dark silicon” issue and diminishing returns of an ever-increasing core count. Hardware manufacturers, out of necessity, switched their focus to accelerators, a new paradigm that pursues specialization and heterogeneity over generality and homogeneity. They are special-purpose hardware structures separated from the CPU with aspects that exhibit a high degree of variability. We define a taxonomy based on fourteen of these aspects, grouped in four macro-categories: general aspects, host coupling, architecture, and software aspects. According to it, we categorize around 100 accelerators of the last decade from both industry and academia, and critically analyze emerging trends. We complete our discussion with throughput and efficiency figures. Then, we discuss some prominent open challenges that accelerators are facing, analyzing state-of-the-art solutions, and suggesting prospective research directions for the future.
ISSN:1383-7621
1873-6165
DOI:10.1016/j.sysarc.2022.102561