Energy Efficiency of Many-Soft-Core Processors

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.