On the advantage of time-varying diversity of workload on Functionally Asymmetric multi-core

Abstract : Functionally Asymmetric Multi-Processor (FAMP) design represents a tradeoff between the programmability of a symmetric multi-processor and the exploitation of the workload heterogeneity of multi-processor system-on-chip. The functional asymmetry's management is a crucial issue in finding the potential power efficiency of the FAMP design. In this work-in-progress we propose a FAMP power model and extract some guidelines that take advantage of the asymmetric design. By analysing the behaviour of a SIMD hardware extension on the PARSEC benchmark suite, we show that the workload exhibits interesting hardware extension utilisation properties. In order to fit FAMP architectures, classical compilation/execution models, which are very efficient for symmetric multi-core, must be re-engineered.