CS 395T Advanced Compilers (52060)

Paper Review


Name: Ben Hardekopf
Paper Number: 3
Paper Citation: The Technology Behind Crusoe Processors, Alexander Klaiber. Transmeta Technical Report, January 2000.

Abstract

In January of 2000, Transmeta Corporation introduced the Crusoe processors, an x86-compatible family of solutions that combines strong performance with remarkably low power consumption. As might be expected, a new technology for designing and implementing microprocessors underlies the development of these products. As might not be expected, the new technology is fundamentally software-based: the power savings come from replacing large numbers of transistors with software.

The Crusoe processor solutions consist of a hardware engine logically surrounded by a software layer. The engine is a very long instruction word (VLIW) CPU capable of executing up to four operations in each clock cycle. The VLIWs native instruction set bears no resemblance to the x86 instruction set; it has been designed purely for fast low-power implementation using conventional CMOS fabrication. The surrounding software layer gives x86 programs the impression that they are running on x86 hardware. The software layer is called Code Morphing software because it dynamically morphs x86 instructions into VLIW instructions. The Code Morphing software includes a number of advanced features to achieve good system-level performance. Code Morphing support facilities are also built into the underlying CPUs. In other words, the Transmeta designers have judiciously rendered some functions in hardware and some in software, according to the product design goals and constraints. Different goals and constraints in future products may result in different hardware-software partitioning.

Transmeta's Code Morphing technology changes the entire approach to designing microprocessors. By demonstrating that practical microprocessors can be implemented as hardware-software hybrids, Transmeta has dramatically expanded the design space that microprocessor designers can explore for optimum solutions. Microprocessor development teams may now enlist software experts and expertise, working largely in parallel with hardware engineers to bring products to market faster. Upgrades to the software portion of a microprocessor can be rolled out independently from the chip. Finally, decoupling the hardware design from the system and application software that use it frees hardware designers to evolve and eventually replace their designs without perturbing legacy software.

Novelty

The basic goal of Crusoe is to enable system designers to make various tradeoffs between HW and SW in order to meet different design goals for different markets (e.g. reduced power consumption v. performance), while still being able to efficiently run all legacy x86 code without modification or recompilation. By separating the HW arch. from the ISA, the system designers are much freer to make changes in the HW, making their job much easier. This division isn't new -- e.g. the Pentium II also dynamically translates from the x86 ISA to internal RISC-like micro-ops (although the motivation here is simply to improve performance while still supporting legacy code). The contribution of Crusoe lies in the techniques they use to allow designers to simplify the HW while still maintaining acceptable performance, and the code morpher that allows the translation apparatus to be modified in SW. BR>
The novel HW assistance is what enables efficient emulation of precise exceptions and self-modifying code; it also enables more aggressive instruction scheduling for better optimization. Three mechanisms support these capabilities: a transaction-based execution of the translated instructions using shadow registers and a memory store buffer; alias HW that enables loads and stores to be reordered without regard to dependencies; and the ability to write-protect translated x86 code to detect dynamic code modification.

Another novel capability is the Longrun power management, which can adjust the clock frequency and voltage on the fly.

Flaws

This paper reads like PR, not a scientific report. This is only to be expected since the paper is a company tech report not a conference or journal paper -- but it's not as useful as it could be.

There is practically nothing reported about Crusoe's performance, other than a rather defensive passage about its performance on some benchmarks; this passage makes it clear that Crusoe's performance may not be that great unless the translation cost is amortized over a long period of time.

The paper makes the claim that different performance/power consumption/complexity tradeoffs could be made by varying the functionality implemented in HW vs. SW. It would be nice to have some idea of what the relationship between the HW/SW line and performance/power consumption/etc really is -- i.e. is the tradeoff such that we can make fine-grained adjustments by moving a few things from HW to SW or vice versa, or is there a "cliff" that we fall off of at some point.

Broader Picture

One of the themes of this class is to find the right level of abstraction for the virtual interface. Crusoe puts it at the ISA level, mainly for reasons of compatability with existing x86 code (a smart decision from a business stand-point). There are two directions we could take from here -- horizontally, it would be interesting to see how easily the code morpher could be adapted to translate other ISAs; what factors make an ISA easy/hard to deal with (e.g. RISC v. CISC)? Vertically, we could take the interface level further down towards the HW (imagine an XML like app that defined its own ISA based on some primitives supplied by the interface) or further up towards the SW (rather like the Java Virtual Machine). Of course, without a better idea of the lessons learned from Crusoe (i.e. a more honest evaluation than given in this paper, including problems), it's difficult to extrapolate and learn from the work done here. The paper may best be used as a good source of raw ideas that can be used as a starting point to answer these questions.