Architectural Contesting

Previous studies have proposed techniques to dynamically change the architecture of a processor to better suit the characteristics of the workload at hand. However, all such approaches are prone to a fundamental trade-off between the architectural diversity they can provide and the latency of architectural change, their fixed-configuration performance and the complexity of finding the best architectural configuration for the workload at hand. In this study we argue that the full potential of dynamic architectural customization can only be achieved by diminishing the effect of the degree of available architectural diversity on the aforementioned performance factors. The performance of a statically designed processing core in a heterogeneous multi-core system is independent of the architectural diversity available. In addition, it is apparent that concurrent execution of code on differently architected cores automatically reveals which architecture is more suitable for the characteristi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Hashem Hashemi Najaf-abadi, Eric Rotenberg
• Keywords: Architectural Diversity, Available Architectural Diversity, Computer Architecture, Dynamic Architectural Customization, HPCA 2009