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A growing body of work has compiled a strong case for the single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core paradigm. A single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core provides multiple, differently-designed superscalar core types that can streamline the execution of diverse programs and program phases. No prior research has addressed the 'Achilles' heel of this paradigm: design and verification effort is multiplied by the number of different core types.

This work frames superscalar processors in a canonical form, so that it becomes feasible to quickly design many cores that differ in the three major superscalar dimensions: superscalar width, pipeline depth, and sizes of structures for extracting instruction-level parallelism (ILP). From this idea, we develop a toolset, called FabScalar, for automatically composing the synthesizable register-transfer-level (RTL) designs of arbitrary cores within a canonical superscalar template. The template …