Evaluating a Low-Power Dual-Core Architecture

With the rapid development of silicon technology, chip die size and clock frequency increase; it becomes very difficult to further increase the performance of silicon devices only by speeding up their clock. We believe a more practical way to increase their speed is to use the abundant transistor resource to implement several cores and make the cores execute in parallel. In the paper, we propose a processor-coprocessor architecture to increase the speed of the most frequently-used short program segments and reduce their power consumption. As these segments dominate the dynamic execution trace of embedded programs, the overall increment of performance and power-saving is significant. A dataflow coprocessor and a RISC coprocessor are implemented for comparison. The experimental results show the dataflow coprocessor is faster and more power-efficient than the other one, due to the fact that the dataflow coprocessor offers natural properties for fine-grained instruction-level parallel processing and its parallelism is self-scheduling. Except for data dependencies, there is no constrained sequentiality, so a dataflow program allows all forms of instruction parallelism.