Search the site

The University of Manchester Library

In April 2016 Manchester eScholar was replaced by the University of Manchester’s new Research Information Management System, Pure. In the autumn the University’s research outputs will be available to search and browse via a new Research Portal. Until then the University’s full publication record can be accessed via a temporary portal and the old eScholar content is available to search and browse via this archive.

Boosting Single Thread Performance in Mobile Processors using Reconfigurable Acceleration

Ndu, Geoffrey Tochukwu

[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2012.

Access to files

Abstract

Mobile processors, a subclass of embedded processors, are increasingly employing CMP (Chip Multi-Processor) designs to improve performance. Single-thread performance in CMP suffers as vendors move to fewer per core resources to enable them to instantiate more cores on a die. Single thread performance is still important according to Amdahl's law. The traditional technique for efficiently boosting serial performance in embedded processors, dedicated hardware acceleration, is unsuitable for modern mobile processors because of the heterogeneity and the diversity of applications they run. This thesis investigates the possibility and potential benefits of using a general purpose accelerator (placed within the datapath of a CPU), reconfigured on an application-by-application basis, as a means of efficiently increasing single-thread performance. Configurations for the accelerator are generated at runtime, via a JIT compiler, which allows it to accelerate dynamically generated code. This is important as dynamic code generation is now prevalent on mobile processors.

Bibliographic metadata

Type of resource:
Content type:
Administered thesis
Form of thesis:
Traditional
Type of submission:
Doctoral level ETD - final
Thesis title:
Boosting Single Thread Performance in Mobile Processors using Reconfigurable Acceleration
Degree type:
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree programme:
PhD Computer Science
Publication date:
2012-11-04T20:48:17
Institution:
The University of Manchester
Location:
Manchester, UK
Total pages:
147
Abstract:
Mobile processors, a subclass of embedded processors, are increasingly employing CMP (Chip Multi-Processor) designs to improve performance. Single-thread performance in CMP suffers as vendors move to fewer per core resources to enable them to instantiate more cores on a die. Single thread performance is still important according to Amdahl's law. The traditional technique for efficiently boosting serial performance in embedded processors, dedicated hardware acceleration, is unsuitable for modern mobile processors because of the heterogeneity and the diversity of applications they run. This thesis investigates the possibility and potential benefits of using a general purpose accelerator (placed within the datapath of a CPU), reconfigured on an application-by-application basis, as a means of efficiently increasing single-thread performance. Configurations for the accelerator are generated at runtime, via a JIT compiler, which allows it to accelerate dynamically generated code. This is important as dynamic code generation is now prevalent on mobile processors.
Thesis main supervisor(s):
Thesis advisor(s):
Degree grantor:
Language:
en

Institutional metadata

University researcher(s):
Academic department(s):

Record metadata

Manchester eScholar ID:
uk-ac-man-scw:180856
Created by:
Ndu, Geoffrey
Created:
4th November, 2012, 20:48:18
Last modified by:
Ndu, Geoffrey
Last modified:
2nd November, 2015, 13:54:34

Can we help?

The library chat service will be available from 11am-3pm Monday to Friday (excluding Bank Holidays). You can also email your enquiry to us.