High Performance Computing Group - Industrial Affiliates Program

Adding a Vector Unit to a Superscalar Processor


Project Leader:

Roger Espasa (roger@ac.upc.es)
Mateo Valero (mateo@ac.upc.es)
Project Members
Francisca Quintana (paqui@ac.upc.es)
Jesús Corbal (jcorbal@ac.upc.es)

Project Description

The goal of this project is to study the tradeoffs involved in adding a vector unit to a current out-of-order superscalar processor. The vector unit targets three application domains: numerical codes, its traditional realm of application, multimedia codes and bandwidth-hungry commercial applications such as databases.  A central aspect of this research involves the design of an adequate on-chip cache hierarchy that can simultaneously handle the needs of traditional scalar/integer code and the bandwidth requirements of the vector unit.
 


Relevant publications