Conclusions - Multi-objective Design Space Exploration of Multiprocessor SoC Architectures - page 205

Conclusions
With our work on MULTICUBE project and this topic, we have pushed towards the
adoption of automatic design space exploration for the design of multi-processor
architectures for embedded computing systems. To demonstrate the effectiveness of
the design techniques developed in the MULTICUBE project, besides the results
already reported in Part II of the topic, several assessment and validation activities
have been carried out on real industrial design vehicles defined as use cases. The as-
sessment has mainly been based on the application of the automatic DSE assessment
procedure as defined in Chap. 1. The procedure has then been adapted by the respon-
sible of each use case to comply with the specificities of its particular application
and context, but without modifying the aim and the general steps of the original one.
The main results of the comparison of the application of a manual or semi-automatic
optimisation flow with respect to an automatic optimisation flow can be summarized
by the following considerations.
DS2, the leading supplier of silicon and software for Powerline Communications
(recently DS2 assets and technologies were bought by Marvell Technology Group)
has applied the procedure to its Powerline use case described in Chap. 7 and suitable
for advanced communication system to enable a fast and reliable transfer of audio,
video and data information by using the most ubiquitous transmission system: the
power lines. The general DSE assessment procedure has then be adapted to the pecu-
liarities of the Powerline use case to test how the different methodologies and tools
developed in the MULTICUBE project can be effectively applied to this industrial
design flow. The advantages found by DS2 on the target use case can be summarized
as follows:
The proposed flow can save up to 80% of designer time while achieving better results in terms
of performance since much more simulations can be run and analyzed by following this flow
obtaining ten times more possible combinations than with the semi-automatic design flow.
STMicroelectronics, one of the world's largest semiconductor companies, has ap-
plied the MULTICUBE design flow to design and optimize the SP2 low power
advanced computing processor developed by STM Beijing for generic computing
applications. The design space of the use case is very large including several architec-
tural parameters concerning out-of-order execution parameters, memory hierarchy
parameters and branch prediction parameters. To quantify the benefits of using the