2003 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD'03)
Design and Performance of Compressed Interconnects for High Performance Servers
San Jose, California
October 13-October 15
ISBN: 0-7695-2025-1
As microprocessors scale rapidly in frequency, the design of fast and efficient interconnects becomes extremely important for low latency data access and high performance. In this paper, we evaluate a technique for reducing the interconnect width by exploiting the spatial and temporal locality in communication transfers (addresses & data). The width reduction implies a number of other advantages including higher operating frequency, reduced pin-count, lower chip & board cost, etc. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by performing trace-driven simulations for two well-known commercial server workloads (SPECweb99 and TPC-C). We also study the sensitivity of the compression hit ratio with respect to the number of bits compressed, size of the encoding/decoding table used and the replacement policy. The results indicate that the proposed technique has a potential to reduce address bus width in most cases and data bus widths in some cases while maintaining equal or better performance than in the uncompressed case.