Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
2.8
Take-Away Points
Flow control is needed for guaranteeing lossless data transfer between any two
peers and its operation is directly related to the selected buffering architecture.
Buffers at the sender and the receiver can be from simple 1-slot and 2-slot elastic
elements to more sophisticated FIFO queues that can host multiple in-flight words.
Ready/valid and credit-based flow control are equivalent flow control mechanisms
but with different characteristics in terms of their minimum buffering requirements.
Pipelined links that increase the notification cycle of any flow-control mechanism
increase also the minimum buffering requirements for supporting full throughput
transmissions. The transmission of wide messages requires the packetization and
the serialization of each message to packets of smaller flits that travel in the network
one after the other passing all intermediate nodes in multiple cycles.
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