What's So Important About Processor Extensibility?

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Designers must carefully weigh the gains against the costs, many of which are not immediately obvious.

semiengineering.com, May. 28, 2020 – 

While the ability to extend a processor is nothing new, market dynamics are forcing a growing percentage of the industry to consider it a necessary part of their product innovation. From small IoT functions to massive data centers and artificial intelligence, the need to create an optimized processing platform is often the only way to get more performance or lower power out of the silicon area available.

Many consider extensibility as the ability to add instructions, and yet larger gains are possible when infrastructure and communications are considered as part of the opportunity space. For example, direct processor-to-processor communications through dedicated hardware channels can offer huge power and performance advantages over old techniques such as symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). These old mechanisms rely on communications across power-hungry bus architectures and shared memory.

Distributed processing also enables greater degrees of specialization, but to benefit from this the entire flow must become optimal enough that increased development costs can justify the performance gains. The industry appears to be at a tipping point, with RISC-V helping to nudge it towards being a standard design practice.

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