Tightly coupled accelerator
US7350055B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Jan 31, 2005 |
| Grant date | Mar 25, 2008 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Aug 13, 2025 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06F9/3897
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
An accelerator 120 is tightly coupled to the normal execution unit 110. The operand store, which could be a register file 130, a stack based operand store or other operand store is shared by the execution unit and the accelerator unit. Operands may also be accessed as immediate values within the instructions themselves. The sequences of individual program instructions corresponding to computational subgraphs remain within a program but can be recognized by the accelerator as suitable for acceleration and when encountered are executed by the accelerator instead of by the normal execution unit. Within such tightly coupled arrangement problems can arise due to a lack of register resources within the system. The present technique provides that at least some intermediate operand values which are generated within the accelerator, but are determined not to be referenced outside of the computational subgraph concerned, are not written to the operand store.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.