The potential energy efficiency of vector acceleration

Energy efficiency of computation is quickly becoming a key problem from the chip through the data center. This paper presents the first quantitative study of the potential energy efficiency of vector accelerators. We propose and study a vector accelerator architecture suitable for implementation in a 70nm technology. The vector architecture has a high-bandwidth on-chip cache system coupled to 16 independent memory channels. We show that such an accelerator can achieve speedups of 10X or more on loop kernels in comparison to a quad-issue superscalar uniprocessor, while using less energy. We also introduce run-ahead lanes, a complexity and energy efficient means of tolerating variable latency from crossbar contention, cache bank conflicts, cache misses, and the memory system. Run-ahead lanes only synchronize on dependencies or when explicitly directed.