Preliminary evaluation of SHAVER: sharing vector registers with an accelerator
摘要
In recent years, demand for data-parallel processing has been growing, and this parallelism often appears in artificial intelligence processes. One method to accelerate these processes is using domain-specific architecture (DSA). A common data transfer method on DSA is DMA (direct memory access). There are several studies on DMA-based accelerators. However, few studies focus on data transfer methods. In this paper, a vector register-sharing mechanism has been proposed as a new data transfer method. Our proposed mechanism is named “SHAVER." In this mechanism, a part of vector registers is directly shared with an accelerator. An open-source RISC-V vector co-processor is used to evaluate the mechanism’s potential. It has been implemented on an FPGA and a simulator for the evaluations. The results indicate the possibility of the proposal mechanism to achieve a maximum of 8.38% speedup over DMA transfer.