Multicast on-chip communication is encountered in various cache-coherence protocols targeting multi-core processors, and its pervasiveness is increasing due to the proliferation of machine learning accelerators. In-network handling of multicast traffic imposes additional switching-level restrictions to guarantee deadlock freedom, while it stresses the allocation efficiency of Network-on-Chip (NoC) routers. In this work, we propose a novel partitioned NoC router microarchitecture, called SmartFork, which employs a versatile and cost-efficient multicast packet replication scheme that allows the design of high-throughput and low-cost NoCs. The design is adapted to the average branch splitting observed in real-world multicast routing algorithms. Compared to state-of-the-art NoC multicast approaches, SmartFork is demonstrated to yield high performance in terms of latency and throughput, while still offering a cost-effective implementation.

针对多核处理器的各种高速缓存一致性协议中都遇到了多播片上通信，由于机器学习加速器的激增，其泛滥程度不断提高。多播流量的网络内处理强加了附加的交换级别限制，以确保死锁自由，同时强调了片上网络（NoC）路由器的分配效率。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新颖的分区NoC路由器微体系结构，称为SmartFork。，它采用了一种通用且具有成本效益的多播数据包复制方案，该方案允许设计高吞吐量和低成本的NoC。该设计适用于实际多播路由算法中观察到的平均分支拆分。与最新的NoC组播方法相比，SmartFork在延迟和吞吐量方面表现出很高的性能，同时仍然提供了具有成本效益的实施方案。