A Low-Area, Energy-Efficient 64-Bit Reconfigurable Carry Select Modified Tree-Based Adder for Media Signal Processing

Multimedia systems play an essential part in our daily lives and have drastically improved the quality of life over time. Multimedia devices like cellphones, radios, televisions, and computers require low-area and low-power reconfigurable adders to process greedy computation algorithms for the real-time audio/video signal and image processing such as discrete cosine transform, inverse discrete cosine transform, and fast Fourier transform, etc. In this thesis, a novel 64-bit reconfigurable adder is proposed and implemented to reduce the area and power consumption. This adder can be run-time reconfigured to different reconfigurable word lengths, i.e., one 64- bit, two 32-bits, four 16-bits or eight 8-bits addition, depending on the partition signal command. A Carry Select Modified Tree (CSMT) based adder is used in the reconfigurable adder to reduce the area by 22 % and the power consumption by 47 % when compared to the conventional design. The proposed adder, implemented in 180 nm CMOS technology at 1.8-volt supply, has a worst-case Delay of 20.67 nanoseconds with an overall area of 36,417 μm² and power consumption of 447.93 μW

Selective Vectorization for Short-Vector Instructions

Multimedia extensions are nearly ubiquitous in today's general-purpose processors. These extensions consist primarily of a set of short-vector instructions that apply the same opcode to a vector of operands. Vector instructions introduce a data-parallel component to processors that exploit instruction-level parallelism, and present an opportunity for increased performance. In fact, ignoring a processor's vector opcodes can leave a significant portion of the available resources unused. In order for software developers to find short-vector instructions generally useful, however, the compiler must target these extensions with complete transparency and consistent performance. This paper describes selective vectorization, a technique for balancing computation across a processor's scalar and vector units. Current approaches for targeting short-vector instructions directly adopt vectorizing technology first developed for supercomputers. Traditional vectorization, however, can lead to a performance degradation since it fails to account for a processor's scalar resources. We formulate selective vectorization in the context of software pipelining. Our approach creates software pipelines with shorter initiation intervals, and therefore, higher performance. A key aspect of selective vectorization is its ability to manage transfer of operands between vector and scalar instructions. Even when operand transfer is expensive, our technique is sufficiently sophisticated to achieve significant performance gains. We evaluate selective vectorization on a set of SPEC FP benchmarks. On a realistic VLIW processor model, the approach achieves whole-program speedups of up to 1.35x over existing approaches. For individual loops, it provides speedups of up to 1.75x

Dynamic Selective Devectorization for Efficient Power Gating of SIMD Units in a HW/SW Co-Designed Environment

Leakage power is a growing concern in current and future microprocessors. Functional units of microprocessors are responsible for a major fraction of this power. Therefore, reducing functional unit leakage has received much attention in the recent years. Power gating is one of the most widely used techniques to minimize leakage energy. Power gating turns off the functional units during the idle periods to reduce the leakage. Therefore, the amount of leakage energy savings is directly proportional to the idle time duration. This paper focuses on increasing the idle interval for the higher SIMD lanes. The applications are profiled dynamically, in a HW/SW co-designed environment, to find the higher SIMD lanes usage pattern. If the higher lanes need to be turned-on for small time periods, the corresponding portion of the code is devectorized to keep the higher lanes off. The devectorized code is executed on the lowest SIMD lane. Our experimental results show average SIMD accelerator energy savings of 12% and 24% relative to power gating, for SPECFP2006 and Physicsbench. Moreover, the slowdown caused due to devectorization is less than 1%.Postprint (author’s final draft

On the scalability of 1- and 2-dimensional SIMD extensions for multimedia applications

SIMD extensions are the most common technique used in current processors for multimedia computing. In order to obtain more performance for emerging applications SIMD extensions need to be scaled. In this paper we perform a scalability analysis of SIMD extensions for multimedia applications. Scaling a 1-dimensional extension, like Intel MMX, was compared to scaling a 2-dimensional (matrix) extension. Evaluations have demonstrated that the 2-d architecture is able to use more parallel hardware than the 1-d extension. Speed-ups over a 2-way superscalar processor with MMX-like extension go up to 4X for kernels and up to 3.3X for complete applications and the matrix architecture can deliver, in some cases, more performance with simpler processor configurations. The experiments also show that the scaled matrix architecture is reaching the limits of the DLP available in the internal loops of common multimedia kernels.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE INSTRUCTION SET ARCHITECTURE FOR DATA LARS

The ideal memory system assumed by most programmers is one which has high capacity, yet allows any word to be accessed instantaneously. To make the hardware approximate this performance, an increasingly complex memory hierarchy, using caches and techniques like automatic prefetch, has evolved. However, as the gap between processor and memory speeds continues to widen, these programmer-visible mechanisms are becoming inadequate. Part of the recent increase in processor performance has been due to the introduction of programmer/compiler-visible SWAR (SIMD Within A Register) parallel processing on increasingly wide DATA LARs (Line Associative Registers) as a way to both improve data access speed and increase efficiency of SWAR processing. Although the base concept of DATA LARs predates this thesis, this thesis presents the first instruction set architecture specification complete enough to allow construction of a detailed prototype hardware design. This design was implemented and tested using a hardware simulator