SCATTER-GATHER INTELLIGENT MEMORY ARCHITECTURE FOR UNSTRUCTURED STREAMING DATA ON MULTIPROCESSOR SYSTEMS

摘要

A scatter/gather technique optimizes unstructured streaming memory accesses, providing off-chip bandwidth efficiency by accessing only useful data at a fine granularity, and off-loading memory access overhead by supporting address calculation, data shuffling, and format conversion.

主权项

1. A processor comprising:
a core including:
a computation processor; anda scatter/gather engine coupled to the computation processor, the scatter/gather engine to generate sub-cache line sized non-sequential data accesses to a memory based on an access pattern communicated to the scatter/gather engine from and defined by an application, to communicate sub-cache line sized data with the memory, wherein the scatter/gather engine includes an access processor, an access pattern generator, and a cache interface, wherein the access pattern generator is to generate the sub-cache line sized non-sequential data accesses to the memory based on an indirect access pattern; and a cache coupled to the core, wherein data is to be transferred between the cache and the memory using full-cache line sized transfers.