A Scalable Microarchitecture Design that Enables Dynamic Code Execution for Variable-Issue Clustered Processors

The dynamic run-time complexity of embedded applications is steadily increasing. Currently, only specialized Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures can deliver the required processing power as well as energy efficiency. Although today's MPSoCs incorporate different, potentially reconfigurable cores, their ability to dynamically balance exploitable instruction-, data-, and thread-level parallelism is still very limited. In this paper, we present a novel coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture that can be adapted to operate on different computation granularities and types of parallelism at run time, depending on the application's needs. Our contributions comprise different micro architectural techniques realizing dynamic operation execution for Run-time Scalable Issue Width (RSIW) processor instances. These enable to adapt on demand the issue width of out-of-order RSIW processor instances. Our results show that significant performance improvements can be obtained by our dynamic operation execution technique compared to atomic instruction execution.