MAGPIE: System-level Evaluation of Manycore Systems with Emerging Memory Technologies

Abstract

The design complexity of high-performance embedded systems is getting very challenging as they keep on integrating more cores with innovative communication and memory technologies, in order to efficiently achieve various functionalities. This trend is typically observed in chips embedded within smartphones such as the Exynos 5 Octa one. It relies on the recent ARM big.LITTLE technology composed of eight cores; four Cortex-A15 high-performance cores for heavy workloads and four Cortex-A7 low-power cores for light workloads. Traditional memories are known as a major obstacle to energy-proportionality and their static power consumption is becoming the most important energy budget. Integrating emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies in system design is a very promising way to reach a complete energy-proportionality. In this paper, we present a holistic design evaluation tool, named MAGPIE explorer, which aims at manycore systems integrating emerging NVM technologies for energy-efficiency. MAGPIE stands for Manycore Architecture enerGy and Performance evaluatIon Environment. It is built upon three mature and popular tools; the gem5 full-system simulator, the McPAT and NVSim power/energy and area estimation tools for CMOS, SOI and NVM technologies. MAGPIE explorer enables a designer to specify input design specifications and run a seamless evaluation flow that automatically produces results including application outputs, performance numbers, area, power and energy consumption.

Publication
In International Workshop on Emerging Memory Solutions