Performance and power analysis of time-multiplexed execution on dynamically reconfigurable processor

Dynamically reconfigurable processor (DRP) developed by NEC Electronics is a coarse grain reconfigurable processor that selects a datapath called a context from the on-chip repository of sixteen circuit configurations at runtime. The time-multiplexed execution based on the multi-context functionality is expected to drastically improve area and power efficiency. To demonstrate the impact of the time-multiplexed execution, we have implemented several stream applications on DRP with various context sizes. Throughout the evaluation based on real application designs, we analyzed the impact of the time-multiplexed execution on performance and power dissipation quantitatively.