Domain Specific Instruction Set Extensions

Abstract

Over the past years, a considerable amount of effort has been devoted to the definition and implementation of techniques for the optimization and acceleration of applications on various computing platforms. Among these techniques, the extension of a given instruction-set architecture with custom instructions has become a common approach. Custom instructions effectively reduce the dynamic instruction count, which, in turn, leads to increase in performance and reduction in power consumption. Traditionally, existing techniques address Instruction-Set Extension (ISE) on a per-application basis. Anyhow, when many applications have to be considered at the same time, ISE on a per-application basis is, clearly, less effective, as the custom instructions have often limited re-utilization across applications. To overcome this problem, we propose a new framework for the automatic generation of domain-specific ISEs. Experimental results show that, the proposed framework, evaluated on a number of applications from various domains, can effectively generate domain-specific instructions with high utilization factor across the targeted applications. At the same time, the generated instructions reduce the instruction count, 45% on average and upto 80% in special cases. This, in turn, can lead to considerable improvements in performance and reduction of power consumption.