A HW/SW Co-designed Programmable Functional Unit

In this paper, we propose a novel programmable functional unit (PFU) to accelerate general purpose application execution on a modern out-of-order x86 processor. Code is transformed and instructions are generated that run on the PFU using a co-designed virtual machine (Cd-VM). Results presented in this paper show that this HW/SW co-designed approach produces average speedups in performance of 29% in SPECFP and 19% in SPECINT, and up-to 55%, over modern out-of-order processor.