Evaluating Auto-adaptation Methods for Fine-grained Adaptable Processors

To achieve energy savings while maintaining adequate performance, system designers and programmers wish to create the best possible match between program behavior and the underlying hardware. Well-known current approaches include DVFS and task migrations in heterogeneous platforms such as big.LITTLE processors. Additionally, processors have been proposed in literature that are able to adapt (parts of) their organization to the workload. These reconfigurations can be managed using hardware monitors, profiling and other compile-time information or a combination of both. Many current solutions are suitable for heterogeneous systems, as migration penalties pose a practical limit to the maximum adaptation frequency, but not for dynamic processors that can adapt much more fine-grained.

In this paper, we present two novel concepts to aid these low-penalty reconfigurable processors - one requiring an ISA extension and one without. Our experimental results show that our approaches enable a dynamic processor to reduce the energy-delay product by up to 25% and on average 10% to 18% compared to the best performing static setups.