Energy-Efficient Exposed Datapath Architecture With a RISC-V Instruction Set Mode

Transport triggered architectures (TTAs) follow the static programming model of very long instruction word (VLIW) processors but expose additional information of the processor datapath in the programming interface, which enables low-level code optimizations but results in lower code density. Multi-instruction-set architectures add flexiblity via their ability to switch instruction sets during execution. The added flexibility is interesting for VLIW-style processors because it enables reducing the large instruction stream energy footprint by using an instruction set with enhanced code density in regions with limited opportunities for exploitation of instruction level parallelism. In this article, we introduce a dual instruction-set architecture, “Dual-IS”, that implements both RISC-V and TTA instruction sets with shared datapath resources by means of a lightweight microcode unit. In order to utilize the flexible architecture automatically, we introduce a compilation method that is able to independently target code for both instruction sets based on static code analysis and a microarchitectural model of the processor. Compared to a single-ISA TTA processor, we were able to lower the instruction stream energy consumption 45% on average in the best design point, which resulted in a total energy consumption reduction of 26% and a 0.4% lower run time.