流体系结构和Imagine

随着芯片上晶体管的数目日益增多,微处理器体系结构设计人员面临新的问题。如:运算单元的芯片占有率低下、带宽成为瓶颈、功耗过高等等。针对这些问题,美国斯坦福大学的W.J.Dally等提出了一种新型的流体系结构,其原型芯片Imagine结构非常简单,但它的性能是令人惊奇的。本文以Imagine为原型介绍流的体系结构,剖析流处理过程,并详细分析流体系结构的特点。

Stream Architecture and Imagine

With advanced IC technology,billions of transistors can be-integrated on a single chip.Thus,designers of micro-pro- cessor system architecture have to face new problems.For example,the occupation rate of chips on operation unit is low,band- widths become bottlenecks and power consumption is high.W.J.Dally and his team from Stanford University raised a new stream architecture to solve these problems.They have developed a prototype processor called Imagine,which has simple struc- ture but incredible performance.This paper,taking Imagine as an prototype,introduced its stream architecture,explained its operation steps and analyzed its characteristics.