UC San Diego

Designing special-purpose processors and ASICs to execute computer programs requires a methodology that varies greatly from traditional general purpose software programming. The benefits of specialized processor designs and ASICs are : lower power consumption, and greater efficiency, as opposed to general purpose processors. Those benefits are the driven motivation in the Arsenal design that aims to incorporate 10s to 1000s of specialized processing elements (SPEs) into one system. Each one of the SPEs performs a well defined functionality that represents the variety of hardware designs, from general purpose processors to special-purpose processors and ASICs. Among those specialized hardware units, the Floating Point hardware infrastructure (FP) presents an important and interesting challenge reflected by its significant area and power requirements on the system. To one end, it makes the idea of having one FP unit per SPE prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, reducing the number of FP units could potentially create a bottleneck, and hence a negative impact on performance. Therefore, there is a significant trade-off between area, power, energy and performance aspects for sharing the FP hardware among Arsenal's SPEs. This thesis focus is designing and analyzing different strategies for sharing FP hardware for the SPEs across Arsenal. Therefore, the main goal is to find a proper balance between area, energy and performance for a set of FP sharing strategies over a sample set of FP applications. Our results show that a shared FP hardware per SPEs complex reduces area, energy and energy-delay with negligible performance degradation amongst all designs