Automatic Counterflow Pipeline Synthesis

The Counterflow Pipeline (CFP) organization may be a good target for synthesis of application-specific microprocessors because it has a regular and simple structure. This paper describes early work using CFP's to improve overall application performance by tailoring a CFP to the kernel loop of an application. A CFP is customized for an application using the kernel loop's data dependency graph to determine processor functionality and interconnection. Our technique builds the design space for a given data dependency graph and explores the space to find the design with the best performance. Preliminary results indicate that speed-up for several small graphs range from 1.3 to 2.0 and that our design space traversal heuristics find designs that are within 10% of optimal.

Childers, Bruce, and Jack Davidson. "Automatic Counterflow Pipeline Synthesis." University of Virginia Dept. of Computer Science Tech Report (1998).