Supporting Runtime Reconfigurable VLIWs Cores Through Dynamic Binary Translation

International audienceSingle ISA-Heterogeneous multi-cores such as the ARM big.LITTLE have proven to be an attractive solution to explore different energy/performance trade-offs. Such architec-tures combine Out of Order cores with smaller in-order ones to offer different power/energy profiles. They however do not really exploit the characteristics of workloads (compute-intensive vs. control dominated). In this work, we propose to enrich these architectures with runtime configurable VLIW cores, which are very efficient at compute-intensive kernels. To preserve the single ISA programming model, we resort to Dynamic Binary Translation , and use this technique to enable dynamic code specialization for Runtime Reconfigurable VLIWs cores. Our proposed DBT framework targets the RISC-V ISA, for which both OoO and in-order implementations exist. Our experimental results show that our approach can lead to best-case performance and energy efficiency when compared against static VLIW configurations