Architecture of an FPGA-Oriented Heterogeneous Multi-core Processor with SIMD-Accelerator Cores

Heterogeneous multi-core processors are at tracted by media processing applications due to their ca pability of drawing strengths of different cores to improve the overall performance. However, the unavailability of an efficient programing environment is a major problem. In this paper, we propose an FPGA-oriented heterogeneous multi-core processor, with GPU-like accelerator cores. We use a CUDA-like programing environment to program the accelerator cores. Although the functionality of the accel erator cores are similar to that of GPU multiprocessors, we have simplified their architecture to be suited in FPGA environment and also to reduce the area and power. Wealso exploit theconfigurability oftheFPGA to optimizethedesign for each application. According to the experimental results, the proposed processor consumes less than 1W of power, occupiesa very small area and gives reasonableprocessing speed with few-tens ofaccelerator cores.