Toward Comprehensive Design Space Exploration on Heterogeneous Multi-core Processors

The theoretical maximum efficiency of heterogeneous multi-core processors (HMPs) is fundamentally determined by their hardware designs. Nonetheless, the achieved efficiency of HMPs is significantly influenced by the strategy employed in resource management (RM). To alleviate the time-consuming nature of comprehensive design space exploration for HMPs, existing work typically follows a route that independently explores HMP designs and RM strategies. However, this route tends to restrict the overall exploration space and efficiency. In this work, we introduce HetDSE, a comprehensive design space exploration framework for HMP design that coordinately explores both HMP designs and RM strategies. We first identify requirements that enable comprehensive exploration, including high-quality design space, fast evaluation, and high-accuracy exploration. To meet these requirements, we propose representative-based design space generation, unified prediction-based evaluation, and iterative refinement exploration methods to achieve comprehensive exploration within a reasonable timeframe. Experimental results demonstrate that HetDSE reduces energy delay square product by 88% compared to the state-of-the-art framework.