A delay model for router microarchitectures
Li-Shiuan Peh; Dally, W.J.
Micro, IEEE
Volume 21, Issue 1, Jan/Feb 2001 Page(s):26 - 34
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/40.903059
Summary:This article introduces a router delay model that takes into
account the pipelined nature of contemporary routers and proposes
pipelines matched to the specific flow control method employed. Given
the type of flow control and router parameters, the model returns router
latency in technology-independent units and the number of pipeline
stages as a function of cycle time. We apply this model to derive
realistic pipelines for wormhole and virtual-channel routers and compare
their performance. Contrary to the conclusions of previous models, our
results show that the latency of a virtual channel router doesn't
increase as we scale the number of virtual channels up to 8 per physical
channel. Our simulation results also show that a virtual-channel router
gains throughput of up to 40 % over a wormhole router
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