Latency criticality aware on-chip communication

Packet-switched interconnect fabric is a promising on-chip communication solution for many-core architectures. It offers high throughput and excellent scalability for on-chip data and protocol transactions. The main problem posed by this communication fabric is the potentially-high and nondeterministic network latency caused by router data buffering and resource arbitration. This paper describes a new method to minimize on-chip network latency, which is motivated by the observation that only a small percentage of on-chip data and protocol traffic is latency-critical. Existing work focusing on minimizing average network latency is thus suboptimal. Such techniques expend most of the design, area, and power overhead accelerating latency-noncritical traffic for which there is no corresponding application-level speedup.

We propose run-time techniques that identify latency-critical traffic by leveraging network data-transaction and protocol information. Latency-critical traffic is permitted to bypass router pipeline stages and latency-noncritical traffic. These techniques are evaluated via a router design that has been implemented using TSMC 65nm technology. Detailed network latency simulation and hardware characterization demonstrate that, for latency-critical traffic, the proposed solution closely approximates the ideal interconnect even under heavy load while preserving throughput for both latency-critical and noncritical traffic.