POSTER: An Integrated Vector-Scalar Design on an In-order ARM Core

Abstract

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.