A Segmented Adaptive Router for Near Energy-Proportional Networks-on-Chip

A Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an essential component of a chip multiprocessor (CMP) which however contributes to a large fraction of system energy. The unpredictability of traffic across a NoC frequently involves an expensive over-sizing of NoC resources which in turn leads to a significant contribution to the CMP power consumption. There exists a body of work addressing this issue, however so far solutions fall short when aiming for power reduction whilst maintaining high NoC performance. This paper proposes to combine router architecture optimizations with smart resource management to overcome this limitation. Based on a fully segmented architecture, we present an online adaptive router adjusting its active routing resources to meet the current traffic demand. This enhanced power-gating strategy significantly decreases both static and dynamic power consumption of the NoC, up to 70% for synthetic traffic patterns and up to 58% for real traffic workloads, while preserving NoC latency and throughput. Thanks to these adaptive power-saving mechanisms the proposed segmented NoC router provides near energy-proportional operation across the range of used benchmarks.