Abstract
The rate of improvement in the single-thread performance of conventional central processing units (CPUs) has decreased significantly over the last decade. This is mainly due to the difficulties in obtaining higher clock frequencies. As a consequence, the focus of development has shifted to multi-threaded execution models and multi-core CPU designs instead. Unfortunately, there are still many important algorithms and applications that cannot easily be rewritten to take advantage of this new computing paradigm. Thus, the performance gap between parallelizable algorithms and those depending on single-thread performance has widened significantly. Application-specific hardware accelerators with optimized pipelines are able to provide improved single-thread performance but have only limited flexibility and require high development effort compared to programming software-programmable processors (SPPs).
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This work was supported by the German national research foundation DFG and by **linx Inc.
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Thielmann, B., Huthmann, J., Wink, T., Koch, A. (2013). Widening the Memory Bottleneck by Automatically-Compiled Application-Specific Speculation Mechanisms. In: Athanas, P., Pnevmatikatos, D., Sklavos, N. (eds) Embedded Systems Design with FPGAs. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1362-2_1
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