Manticore Processor Architecture

Along with the rapid progress of VLSI as predicted by Moore's Law, the performance of a monolithic processor has reached the utmost limit. Now it's difficult to study performance improvement or power-aware computing without multi-core architectures. Multi-core processors are becoming the dominant architecture in the future.Multi-core processors could be divided into homogeneous and heterogeneous ones according to whether the cores are different or identical to each other. Keeping in mind the power-saving principle of embedded systems and the performance/cost ratio consideration of modern processors, we chose the "performance efficiency", which is measured by the performance/transistors ratio, as the measurement to judge a processor design. We studied the most popular normal processors and multi-core processors, reviewed the shortcomings of many important technologies such as virtual memory and cache hierarchy, super scalar, out of order execution, hardware branch prediction, super pipelining, and the challenges all these technologies are facing in the multi-core era. We believe heterogeneous multi-core architectures will outperform their competitors. So we proposed a heterogeneous multi-core processor architecture for embedded systems, which is highly scalable and extendible. This processor is named Manticore, after a legendary animal with human's head, lion's body and dragon's tail.We implemented the Manticore processor on a FPGA development board, and developed a compile time task scheduling strategy for heterogeneous multi-core processors so as to optimize Manticore's performance. This processor indicates that heterogeneous multi-core processor architectures with optimized performance efficiency will no doubtly win their name in the embedded system area.