While many new applications prefer manycore processor with a large number of cores, the exploding communications among multiple cores, caches, and off-chip memories is posing a fundamental challenge on manycore designs. Silicon photonics-based interconnection network promises high bandwidth, low latency, and high energy efficiency, and can potentially meet the communication requirements of manycore processors. In this paper, we propose CAMON, a small low-cost silicon photonic chiplet integrated into the manycore processor package. CAMON chiplet can effectively alleviate the communication bottlenecks of manycore processors and improve the energy efficiency of data movement, especially for large-scale systems. We develop a distributed arbitration system, a low-power low-latency optical interface, and an off-chip laser preactivation mechanism for CAMON. The experimental results show that compared with the electrical network, CAMON can improve the full-system performance per energy by $4.6\times $ , speedup the manycore processor by $2.7\times $ , and save the area of the processor die by 3%, in a 512-core system.

中文翻译：

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CAMON：用于众核处理器的低成本硅光子小芯片

虽然许多新应用更喜欢具有大量内核的多核处理器，但多核、缓存和片外存储器之间的爆炸式通信对多核设计构成了根本性挑战。基于硅光子的互连网络承诺高带宽、低延迟和高能效，并有可能满足多核处理器的通信需求。在本文中，我们提出了 CAMON，这是一种集成到众核处理器封装中的小型低成本硅光子小芯片。CAMON小芯片可以有效缓解众核处理器的通信瓶颈，提高数据移动的能效，特别是对于大型系统。我们开发了分布式仲裁系统、低功耗低延迟光接口，以及用于 CAMON 的片外激光预激活机制。实验结果表明，与电网相比，CAMON 可以将全系统的单位能量性能提高 $4.6\times $ ，通过以下方式加速多核处理器 $2.7\times $ ，并在512核系统中节省3%的处理器芯片面积。