Run-Time Reconfigurable CPU Interlays for Building Flexible Arm SoCs - Raul Garcia
Interlays are tiny reconfigurable fine-grained fabrics embedded into hardened CPUs to allow reconfigurable instruction set extensions. Their purpose is to provide an SoC with a degree of flexibility which is not found in fully hardened SoCs. Interlays can be used to enhance the performance of SoCs by implementing area-efficient application-specific instructions. In this work, we present a case study where a NEON engine is replaced with an Interlay of an assumed ARM Cortex-A9 CPU. We show that this substitution can potentially enhance the SoC flexibility and performance. We show that this can be done with relatively minor modifications to the existing CPU architecture. Raul Garcia is a PhD student at the Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) Group of the School of Computer Science of the University of Manchester. This talk was presented at the Arm Research Summit, 17-19 September 2018. Summit 2019 will be taking place in Austin, TX. Visit arm.com/summit for more details!
Interlays are tiny reconfigurable fine-grained fabrics embedded into hardened CPUs to allow reconfigurable instruction set extensions. Their purpose is to provide an SoC with a degree of flexibility which is not found in fully hardened SoCs. Interlays can be used to enhance the performance of SoCs by implementing area-efficient application-specific instructions. In this work, we present a case study where a NEON engine is replaced with an Interlay of an assumed ARM Cortex-A9 CPU. We show that this substitution can potentially enhance the SoC flexibility and performance. We show that this can be done with relatively minor modifications to the existing CPU architecture. Raul Garcia is a PhD student at the Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) Group of the School of Computer Science of the University of Manchester. This talk was presented at the Arm Research Summit, 17-19 September 2018. Summit 2019 will be taking place in Austin, TX. Visit arm.com/summit for more details!