Latency criticality aware on-chip communication

—Packet-switched interconnect fabric is a promising on-chip communication solution for many-core architectures. It offers high throughput and excellent scalability for on-chip data and protocol transactions. The main problem posed by this communication fabric is the potentially-high and nondeterministic network latency caused by router data buffering and resource arbitration. This paper describes a new method to minimize onchip network latency, which is motivated by the observation that only a small percentage of on-chip data and protocol traffic is latency-critical. Existing work focusing on minimizing average network latency is thus suboptimal. Such techniques expend most of the design, area, and power overhead accelerating latency-noncritical traffic for which there is no corresponding application-level speedup. We propose run-time techniques that identify latency-critical traffic by leveraging network data-transaction and protocol information. Latency-critical traffic is perm...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Zheng Li, Jie Wu, Li Shang, Robert P. Dick, Yihe Sun
• Keywords: DATE 2009, Hardware, Network Latency, Nondeterministic Network Latency, On-chip Data