Power-driven Design of Router Microarchitectures in On-chip Networks

  • Authors:
  • Hangsheng Wang;Li-Shiuan Peh;Sharad Malik

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University,Princeton,NJ;Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University,Princeton,NJ;Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University,Princeton,NJ

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 36th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

As demand for bandwidth increases in systems-on-a-chipand chip multiprocessors, networks are fast replacing busesand dedicated wires as the pervasive interconnect fabric foron-chip communication. The tight delay requirements facedby on-chip networks have resulted in prior microarchitecturesbeing largely performance-driven. While performanceis a critical metric, on-chip networks are also extremelypower-constrained. In this paper, we investigate on-chipnetwork microarchitectures from a power-driven perspective.We first analyze the power dissipation of existing networkmicroarchitectures, highlighting insights that promptus to devise several power-efficient network microarchitectures:segmented crossbar, cut-through crossbar and write-throughbuffer. We also study and uncover the power savingpotential of an existing network architecture: expresscube. These techniques are evaluated with synthetic as wellas real chip multiprocessor traces, showing a reduction innetwork power of up to 44.9%, along with no degradationin network performance, and even improved latency-throughputin some cases.