A growing body of work has compiled a strong case for the single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core paradigm. A single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core provides multiple, differently-designed superscalar core types that can streamline the execution of diverse programs and program phases. No prior research has addressed the “Achilles’ heel” of this paradigm: design and verification effort is multiplied by the number of different core types.

This work frames superscalar processors in a canonical form, so that it becomes feasible to quickly design many cores that differ in the three major superscalar dimensions: superscalar width, pipeline depth, and sizes of structures for extracting instruction- level parallelism (ILP). From this idea, we develop a toolset, called FabScalar, for automatically composing the synthesizable register-transfer-level (RTL) designs of arbitrary cores within a canonical superscalar template. The template defines canonical pipeline stages and interfaces among them. A Canonical Pipeline Stage Library (CPSL) provides many implementations of each canonical pipeline stage, that differ in their superscalar width and depth of sub-pipelining. An RTL generation tool uses the template and CPSL to automatically generate an overall core of desired configuration. Validation experiments are performed along three fronts to evaluate the quality of RTL designs generated by FabScalar: functional and performance (instructions-per-cycle (IPC)) validation, timing validation (cycle time), and confirmation of suitability for standard ASIC flows. With FabScalar, a chip with many different superscalar core types is conceivable.

Bio:

Jayneel Gandhi is currently a Graduate Student in ECE department pursuing PhD under Dr. Mark Hill. He received his bachelor’s degree in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar, India in 2008. Jayneel Gandhi received his Master's degree in Computer Engineering at North Carolina State Univeristy (NCSU) under the guidance of Dr. Eric Rotenberg in 2010. He has gained industrial experience during internships with ST Microelectronics and most recently with Intel. He research interests lies in the area of Computer Architecture and VLSI Design.