Factors Influencing the Performance of a CPU-RFU Hybrid Architecture

Closely coupling a reconfigurable fabric with a conventional processor has been shown to successfully improve the system performance. However, today’s superscalar processors are both complex and adept at extracting Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP), which introduces many complex issues to the design of a hybrid CPU-RFU system. This paper examines the design of a superscalar processor augmented with a closely-coupled reconfigurable fabric. It identifies architectural and compiler issues that affect the performance of the overall system. Previous efforts at combining a processor core with a reconfigurable fabric are examined in the light of these issues. We also present simulation results that emphasize the impact of these factors.