DiAG: A dataflow-inspired architecture for general-purpose processors

Dong Kai Wang, Nam Sung Kim

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The end of Dennard scaling and decline of Moore's law has prompted the proliferation of hardware accelerators for a wide range of application domains. Yet, at the dawn of an era of specialized computing, left behind the trend is the general-purpose processor that is still most easily programmed and widely used but has seen incremental changes for decades. This work uses an accelerator-inspired approach to rethink CPU microarchitecture to improve its energy efficiency while retaining its generality. We propose DiAG, a dataflow-based general-purpose processor architecture that can minimize latency by exploiting instruction-level parallelism or maximize throughput by exploiting data-level parallelism. DiAG is designed to support any RISC-like instruction set without explicitly requiring specialized languages, libraries, or compilers. Central to this architecture is the abstraction of the register file as register 'lanes' that allow implicit construction of the program's dataflow graph in hardware. At the cost of increased area, DiAG offers three main benefits over conventional out-of-order microarchitectures: Reduced front-end overhead, efficient instruction reuse, and thread-level pipelining. We implement a DiAG prototype that supports the RISC-V ISA in SystemVerilog and evaluate its performance, power consumption, and area with EDA tools. In the tested Rodinia and SPEC CPU2017 benchmarks, DiAG configured with 512 PEs achieves a 1.18x speedup and 1.63x improvement in energy efficiency against an aggressive out-of-order CPU baseline.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2021
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages93-106
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450383172
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 19 2021
Event26th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Apr 19 2021Apr 23 2021

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems - ASPLOS

Conference

Conference26th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period4/19/214/23/21

Keywords

  • dataflow architecture
  • general-purpose
  • parallelism

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture

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