Future Work

This chapter lays out some of the potential future directions that BOOM can be taken. To help facilitate such work, the preliminary design sketches are described below.

The BOOM Custom Co-processor Interface (BOCC)

Some accelerators may wish to take advantage of speculative instructions (or even out-of-order issue) to begin executing instructions earlier to maximize de-coupling. Speculation can be handled by either by epoch tags (if in-order issue is maintained to the co-processor) or by allocating mask bits (to allow for fine-grain killing of instructions).

The Vector (“V”) ISA Extension

Implementing the Vector Extension in BOOM would open up the ability to leverage performance (or energy-efficiency) improvements in running data-level parallel codes (DLP). While it would be relatively easy to add vector arithmetic operations to BOOM, the significant challenges lie in the vector load/store unit.

Perhaps unexpectedly, a simple but very efficient implementation could be very small. The smallest possible vector register file (four 64-bit elements per vector) weighs in at 1024 bytes. A reasonable out-of-order implementation could support 8 elements per vector and 16 inflight vector registers (for a total of 48 physical vector registers) which would only be 3 kilobytes. Following the temporal vector design of the Cray I, the vector unit can re-use the expensive scalar functional units by trading off space for time. This also opens up the vector register file to being implemented using 1 read/1 write ports, fitting it in very area-efficient SRAMs. As a point of comparison, one of the most expensive parts of a synthesizable BOOM is its flip-flop based scalar register file. While a 128-register scalar register file comes in at 1024 bytes, it must be highly ported to fully exploit scalar instruction-level parallelism (a three-issue BOOM with one FMA unit is 7 read ports and 3 write ports).