A Heterogeneous Multi-core Processor Architecture for High Performance Computing

The increasing application demands put great pressure on high performance processor design. This paper presents a multi-core System-on-Chip architecture for high performance computing. It is composed of a sparcv8-compliant LEON3 host processor and a data parallel coprocessor based on transport triggered architecture, all of which are tied with a 32-bit AMBA AHB bus. The LEON3 processor performs control tasks and the data parallel coprocessor performs computing intensive tasks. The chip is fabricated in 0.18um standard-cell technology, occupies about 5.3mm2 and runs at 266MHz.