Acceleration of Control Intensive Applications on Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays for Embedded Systems

Embedded systems confront two opposite goals: low-power operation and high performance. The current trend to reach these goals is toward heterogeneous platforms, including multi-core architectures with heterogeneous cores and hardware accelerators. The latter can be divided into custom accelerators...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on computers 2023-09, Vol.72 (9), p.2548-2560
Main Authors: Denkinger, Benoit Walter, Peon-Quiros, Miguel, Konijnenburg, Mario, Atienza, David, Catthoor, Francky
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accelerators
CGRA
Codes
Computer architecture
Embedded systems
Energy consumption
Energy efficiency
Hardware acceleration
Kernel
Kernels
low-power
Microprocessors
Nested loops
Performance evaluation
Power management
Program processors
programmable cores
reconfigurable architecture
RISC
Task analysis
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Summary:Embedded systems confront two opposite goals: low-power operation and high performance. The current trend to reach these goals is toward heterogeneous platforms, including multi-core architectures with heterogeneous cores and hardware accelerators. The latter can be divided into custom accelerators (e.g., ASICs) and programmable domain-specific cores (e.g., DSIPs). VWR2A Denkinger et al. 2022 is a programmable architecture that integrates high computational density and low power memory structures. The flexibility of VWR2A allows a large portion of applications to be covered, resulting in better performance and energy efficiency than ASICs and general-purpose processors. However, while this has been well studied for data-intensive kernels, this is not the case for control-intensive kernels -code with complex if-else and nested loop structures. Traditionally, control-intensive code is left to be executed by the host processor. This situation unnecessarily restricts the potential impact of energy-efficient acceleration, especially at the application level. In this paper, we evaluate the performance and energy consumption of VWR2A for control-intensive code and compare it with an ARM Cortex-M4 processor and a RISC-V Ibex processor. The performance and energy consumption are evaluated at the kernel and application levels. Our results confirm that VWR2A is faster and more energy-efficient than the two considered general-purpose processors also for control-intensive code.
ISSN:0018-9340
1557-9956
DOI:10.1109/TC.2023.3257504