Application Defined Processors

Application defined processors are based on the concept of reconfigurable computing (RC). RC is a computing technology that blurs the line between software and hardware and provides the basis for the next big steps forward in delivering high performance with reduced power and space requirements. RC is implemented using hardware devices that can be reconfigured. Processors in an RC system are created as hardware that is optimized for the application that executes in it.

This article explains RC, examines SRC systems that implement RC and shows the performance advantage RC provides over traditional microprocessors. We also explore the programming model for RC and discuss the potential RC provides for supporting Open Hardware.

RC is a form of computing based on hardware that can be created dynamically for each application that will run in it. RC hardware is comprised of chips whose logic is defined dynamically rather than at the time the chips are fabricated. RC has been around for many years and implemented in a number of different hardware components, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), field programmable object arrays (FPOAs) and complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs). What is important to application developers is that today's reconfigurable chips have a clock rate and capacity that make it practical to do large-scale computing with RC hardware.

The most familiar chip type used to implement RC is the FPGA. An FPGA is a chip composed of SRAM memory cells used to define a configuration for the chip. FPGAs contain logic gates, flip-flops, RAMs, arithmetic cores, clocks and configurable wires to provide interconnection. FPGAs can be configured to implement any arbitrary logic function and, therefore, can be used to create custom processors that can be optimized to an application.

So, a collection of FPGAs could be configured to be a MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC or Xeon processor, or a processor of your own design. In fact, the processor need not even be an instruction processor. It could be a direct execution logic (DEL) processor that contains only computational logic requiring no instructions to define the algorithm.

DEL processors hold great potential for high performance. A DEL processor can be created with exactly the resources required to perform a specific algorithm. Traditional instruction processors have fixed resources, adders, multipliers, registers and cache memory and require significant chip real estate and processing power to implement overhead operations, such as instruction decode and sequencing and cache management.

DEL processors are reconfigurable computers created for each application in contrast to a fixed architecture microprocessor where one size fits all. A DEL processor delivers the most efficient circuitry for any particular application in terms of the precision of the functional units and parallelism that can be found in the algorithm. Being reconfigurable, a unique DEL processor can be created for each application in a fraction of a second.

But why do you care that a DEL processor can be created dynamically for an application, and that it uses its chips more effectively than a microprocessor? The answer is simple: performance and power efficiency. A DEL RC processor can be created with all of the parallelism that exists within an algorithm without the overhead present in a microprocessor. For the remainder of this article, RC processors are assumed to be implemented using FPGAs in order to be more specific in the discussion.

Performance in RC processors comes from parallel execution of logic. RC processors are completely parallel. In fact, the task of constructing the logic for a given algorithm is to coordinate the parallel execution such that intermediate results are created, communicated and retained at the proper instants in time.

A DEL processor is constructed as a network of functional units connected with data paths and control signals. Each computational element in the network becomes active with each clock pulse. Figure 1 shows a fragment of logic for computing an expression and contrasts the utilization of the chip versus a von Neumann instruction processor, like the Intel Pentium 4 microprocessor.

Figure 1. Direct execution logic can put all logic gates to work on the real problem.

Even though a microprocessor can operate at a clock frequency of 3GHz and the FPGA chips operate in the 100–300MHz frequency range, the parallelism and internal bandwidth on a DEL processor can outperform the microprocessor by orders of magnitude better delivered performance. Figure 2 presents some benchmark comparisons between SRC's DEL processor, MAP, and a typical von Neumann instruction processor, the Intel Xeon 2.8GHz microprocessor. Parallel execution of exactly the required number of functional units, high internal bandwidth, elimination of instruction processing overhead and load/store elimination all contribute to overcoming the 30× difference in clock frequency between the MAP and the Intel microprocessor.

Figure 2. Number of 2.8GHz microprocessors required for the same performance as a MAP direct execution logic processor.