Lambda the Ultimate

How might your language design change in light of this sort of vertical integration?

Abstract: General-purpose processors are often unable to exploit the parallelism inherent to the software code. This is why additional hardware accelerators are needed to enable meeting the performance goals. NISC (No-Instruction-Set Computer) is a new approach to hardware-software co-design based on automatic generation of special-purpose processors. It was designed to be self-sufficient and it eliminates the need for other processors in the system. This work describes a method for expanding the application domain of the NISC processor to general-purpose processor systems with large amounts of processor-specific legacy code. This coprocessor-based approach allows application acceleration by utilizing both instruction-level and task-level parallelism by migrating performance-critical parts of an application to hardware without the need for changing the rest of the program code. For demonstration of this concept, a NISC coprocessor WISHBONE interface was designed. It was implemented and tested in a WISHBONE system based on Altium’s TSK3000A general-purpose RISC soft processor and an analytical model was proposed to provide the means to evaluate its efficiency in arbitrary systems.