Short range wireless connectivity for next generation architectures

This paper illustrates preliminary findings in our ongoing effort on integrating Raw, a proposed new processor architecture, with the robust wireless connectivity provided by BlueTooth (BT), one of the most popular short range wireless connectivity standards. Assuming that die sizes are reaching billion transistors in the next decade, it is expected that existing processor architectures are reaching performance and scalability limits. Studies done on the billion transistor Raw processor [9] show that it will be feasible to have Raw processors with thousands of simple processing elements, and that good speedup can be obtained if application communication patterns can be made local. Our work of integrating Raw and BT is motivated on the one hand by the possible performance benefits -as providing a wireless interconnection for Raw could be beneficial because it could improve network, utilization on the wired networks. Our analytical evaluation indicates that in a BT-enabled Raw up to a factor of 5 performance improvement can be obtained for applications that require frequent global messages. On the other hand, we are also motivated by the opportunity to integrate Raw with other devices that are BT compatible in a future ubiquitous computing environment.