In the low-end mobile processor market, power, energy and area budgets are significantly lower than in other markets (e.g. servers or high-end mobile markets). It has been shown that vector processors are a highly energy-efficient way to increase performance; however adding support for them incurs area and power overheads that would not be acceptable for low-end mobile processors. In this work, we propose an integrated vector-scalar design for the ARM architecture that mostly reuses scalar hardware to support the execution of vector instructions. The key element of the design is our proposed block-based model of execution that groups vector computational instructions together to execute them in a coordinated manner.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the RoMoL ERC Advanced Grant GA no 321253 and is supported in part by the European Union (FEDER funds) under contract TIN2015-65316-P. This research has been also supported the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR - FI-DGR 2014).

Peer Reviewed