Energy savings and speedups from partitioning critical software loops to hardware in embedded systems

  • Authors:

  • Greg Stitt;Frank Vahid;Shawn Nematbakhsh

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Riverside, CA;University of California, Riverside, CA;University of California, Riverside, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We present results of extensive hardware/software partitioning experiments on numerous benchmarks. We describe our loop-oriented partitioning methodology for moving critical code from hardware to software. Our benchmarks included programs from PowerStone, MediaBench, and NetBench. Our experiments included estimated results for partitioning using an 8051 8-bit microcontroller or a 32-bit MIPS microprocessor for the software, and using on-chip configurable logic or custom application-specific integrated circuit hardware for the hardware. Additional experiments involved actual measurements taken from several physical implementations of hardware/software partitionings on real single-chip microprocessor/configurable-logic devices. We also estimated results assuming voltage scalable processors. We provide performance, energy, and size data for all of the experiments. We found that the benchmarks spent an average of 80% of their execution time in only 3% of their code, amounting to only about 200 bytes of critical code. For various experiments, we found that moving critical code to hardware resulted in average speedups of 3 to 5 and average energy savings of 35% to 70%, with average hardware requirements of only 5000 to 10,000 gates. To our knowledge, these experiments represent the most comprehensive hardware/software partitioning study published to date.