The Case for Reconfigurable Processors

Processors, from their inception, have been designed to heavily share a limited quantity of active hardware. This trend has continued to present, with modern microprocessors heavily multiplexing small execution engines making room to hold a large number of instructions and data on chip. As we look to the future, the real-estate available on a single VLSI IC continues to increase, shifting the premium away from simply packing computational descriptions on chip and opening up the way to pack entire active computations. Consequently, a substantial fraction of the area on future microprocessors will be devoted to reconfigurable logic supporting the spatial composition of regular computations. Furthermore, the major functional blocks traditionally found on microprocessors (e.g. processing cores, memory blocks, hardwired functional units) will be interconnected in a reconfigurable manner allowing them to be organized and deployed according to the needs of an application.