Swarm processor system: Hardware process scheduler based energy efficient multi-core system

Single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core processors can provide energy efficient performance by properly assigning workloads on two types of cores in a processor: high performance large cores and low power small cores. However, traditional process scheduling mechanism is hard to support an proper workload distribution due to an overhead of fine-grained state monitoring and scheduling. To overcome this problem, we propose Swarm Processor System which supports hardware implemented workload scheduling mechanism. In the proposed system, each core chooses a proper workload by using special hardware modules in the core instead of the scheduler of operating systems. We compare Swarm Processor System against the traditional mechanisms, and found that the proposed method shows the closest energy efficiency to the oracle case with providing stable performance.