Energy Efficiency of Many-Soft-Core Processors

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy efficiency of many-soft-core processors on FPGAs, demonstrating they can outperform ultra-low-power processors and GPGPUs in energy efficiency for general-purpose computing.

Contribution

It introduces a reconfigurable multiprocessing system using many-soft-core processors on FPGA that achieves significantly higher energy efficiency than existing ultra-low-power processors and GPGPUs.

Findings

Achieves 58x higher energy efficiency than recent ultra-low-power processors.

Achieves 124x higher energy efficiency than recent high-performance GPGPUs.

Demonstrates the potential of soft-core processors for energy-efficient general-purpose computing.

Abstract

The growing capacity of integration allows to instantiate hundreds of soft-core processors in a single FPGA to create a reconfigurable multiprocessing system. Lately, FPGAs have been proven to give a higher energy efficiency than alternative platforms like CPUs and GPGPUs for certain workloads and are increasingly used in data-centers. In this paper we investigate whether many-soft-core processors can achieve similar levels of energy efficiency while providing a general purpose environment, more easily programmed, and allowing to run other applications without reconfiguring the device. With a simple application example we are able to create a reconfigurable multiprocessing system achieving an energy efficiency 58 times higher than a recent ultra-low-power processor and 124 times higher than a recent high performance GPGPU.