Energy-Efficient application-specific processors

Abstract

With the mobile computing revolution, high performance computing is redefined by energy efficiency of processors. Energy efficiency is an essential consideration while selecting a processor to be used for an application. This is more critical in mobile and embedded applications which require energy efficient operation. Application specific processors have emerged as a solution for providing low cost, energy-efficient, and high performance architectural implementations. ASIPs (Application-Specific Instruction Set Processors) improve the energy efficiency by using a hardware accelerator which is tightly coupled with the base processor. Various techniques have been proposed to improve energy efficiency of ASIPs by customizing the instruction set. This paper is an attempt to study energy-efficiency in ASIPs.