The design of the Amalgam reconfigurable cluster

Amalgam is a novel architecture for multifunction embedded systems. It integrates multiple reconfigurable and programmable processing resources (known as clusters) to achieve high-performance with low design effort on a variety of multimedia applications. The reconfigurable cluster (RClust) enables Amalgam to exploit the natural parallelism and operator granularities of a target application. The RClust contains a ring of reconfigurable logic interleaved with a banked register file to support Amalgam's register-based inter-cluster communication mechanism. This low-latency mechanism allows the RClust to coordinate with a programmable cluster (PClust) as a special purpose junctional unit implementing small custom operations. The relatively large size of the cluster, however, allows it to implement larger, more independent computational kernels. In this extended abstract, we describe the initial design of the RClust and present results from mapping several benchmarks to Amalgam architectures with and without RClust elements.