FoMR: Post-Silicon Microarchitecture

高性能微处理器是社会所有基础设施背后的计算能力。他们的进步看似永无止境，被公众称为“摩尔定律”，但由于半导体技术和制造的限制，这种进步几乎已经放缓。持续的进步需要在微架构方面取得突破：微处理器执行应用程序的方式，特别是它解锁应用程序中隐藏的并行性的方式。近几十年来，研究人员提出了许多奇特的微架构增强技术，但由于过于专业化，它们的商业化一直受到阻碍。加速任何应用程序的策略很久以前就已经用尽了。剩下的就是精确定位特定应用程序行为的策略，从而导致复杂的微体系结构增强，这些增强在某些（但不是全部）任务上执行得非常好。这个项目从根本上改变了任何微架构增强的价值主张。该项目的影响是：后摩尔时代的可扩展微处理器性能，与行业合作伙伴密切合作，以确保有意义的结果和速度技术转移，并为劳动力培养不同背景的学生。该项目的关键思想是将最先进的微处理器的固定硬件组件与可重构（非固定）硬件组件紧密耦合。固定硬件仍然以基本相同的方式获取和执行指令。编程到可重构硬件中的增强功能介入以解锁指令流中的更多并行性。随着手头任务的变化，可以将不同的增强功能合成到可重构硬件中。因此，微架构增强可以立即商业化/可部署。此外，总的来说，可用的和未来的微架构增强套件涵盖了广泛的应用程序加速行为。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

High-performance microprocessors are the computational horsepower behind all of society's infrastructure. The seemingly unending march of their progress, known to the public as "Moore's Law," has all but slowed owing to semiconductor technology and manufacturing limits. Continued progress requires breakthroughs in microarchitecture: the way the microprocessor executes applications, in particular, the way it unlocks hidden parallelism within them. Researchers have proposed many exotic microarchitecture enhancements in recent decades, but their commercialization has been stymied because they are too specialized. Strategies that speed-up any application were exhausted long ago. All that remains are strategies that pinpoint specific application behaviors, leading to complex microarchitecture enhancements that perform exceedingly well on some, but not all, tasks. This project fundamentally changes the value proposition of any microarchitecture enhancement. The impacts of this project are: scalable microprocessor performance in the post-Moore era, working closely with industry partners to ensure meaningful results and speed technology transfer, and training students of diverse backgrounds for the workforce.The key idea of the project is to tightly couple the fixed hardware components of a state-of-art microprocessor with reconfigurable (not fixed) hardware components. The fixed hardware still fetches and executes instructions in basically the same way. Enhancements programmed into the reconfigurable hardware intervene to unlock more parallelism in the instruction stream. Different enhancements can be synthesized into the reconfigurable hardware as the task at hand changes. Thus, microarchitecture enhancements are instantly commercializable/deployable. Moreover, taken altogether, the suite of available and future microarchitecture enhancements covers a wide range of application behaviors for acceleration.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.