AN OCTA-CORE PROCESSOR WITH SHARED MEMORY AND MESSAGE-PASSING

Jinal K. Tapar, Shrushti K. Tapar, Ashish E. Bhande

Abstract: This being the era of fast, high performance computing, there is the need of having efficient optimizations in the processor architecture and at the same time in memory hierarchy too. Each and every day, the advancement of applications in communication and multimedia systems are compelling to increase number of cores in the main processor viz., dual-core, quadcore, octa-core and so on. But, for enhancing the overall performance of multi processor chip, there are stringent requirements to improve inter-core synchronization. Thus, a MPSoC with 8-cores supporting both message-passing and shared-memory intercore communication mechanisms is implemented on Virtex 5 LX110T FPGA. Each core is based on MIPS III (Microprocessor without interlocked pipelined stages) ISA, handling only integer type instructions and having six-stage pipeline with data hazard detection unit and forwarding logic. The eight processing cores and one central shared memory core are inter connected using 3x3 2-D mesh topology based Network-on-chip (NoC) with virtual channel router. The router is four stage pipelined supporting DOR X-Y routing algorithm and with round robin arbitration technique. For verification and functionality test of above fully synthesized multi core processor, matrix multiplication operation is mapped onto the above said. Partitioning and scheduling of multiple multiplications and addition for each element of resultant matrix has been done accordingly among eight cores to get maximum throughput. All the codes for processor design are written in Verilog HDL.

Keywords: MPSoC, message-passing, shared memory, MIPS, ISA, wormhole router, network-on-chip, SIMD, data level parallelism, 2-D Mesh, virtual channel

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0405071