A Brief Description of the NMP ISA and Benchmarks

The Near Memory Processor (NMP) is a multithreaded vector processor integrated with the memory controller. The NMP works subordinately upon requests from the main processors. The NMP is complementary to the conventional superscalar processors and it is optimized for the bandwidth bounded applications and bit manipulation workloads. A program addressable memory in the NMP, Scratchpad provides an effectively large register set to hold vectors, streams and frequently accessed values. Avoiding saving and restoring the vector registers during context switch, the scratchpad reduces the overhead of the multithreading and enables a simple NMP architectural design. We design an instruction set that includes vector, streaming and bit manipulation instructions. We present the instruction set architecture of the NMP in this report, including register sets, addressing mode and instruction formats. A brief description of the benchmarks is also included