Hardware-Software Co-Design for General-Purpose Processors

Event: Computer Architecture Seminar Series
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/cart/arch

Speaker: Craig Zilles
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: "Hardware-Software Co-Design for General-Purpose Processors"

Date: Monday, April 28, 2008

Time: 3:30 pm

Place: ACES 2.402

Coffee: 3:00 pm

Host: Yale Patt

ABSTRACT:

The shift toward multi-core processors is the most obvious implication
of a greater trend toward efficient computing. In the past, hardware
designers were willing to spend superlinear area and power for
incremental performance improvements, but that era has come to an end.
With the low-hanging fruit of processor microarchitecture having
largely been picked, it is my belief that we will increasingly see a
trend toward co-designing hardware with the software that runs on it.
Processor designers will ask "what minimal features and interfaces
must be place in hardware to achieve our performance goals?"

In this talk, I will discuss our recent work exploring a collection of
hardware primitives for: 1) making trivial the implementation of
speculative compiler optimizations (which both increase performance
and reduce power consumption), 2) implementing a strongly-atomic
Transactional Memory where common-case transactions execute in
hardware with no overhead, but the semantics are defined by software,
and 3) instrumenting code to collect profile information with
negligible overhead.