Enabling Dynamic Heterogeneity Through Core-on-Core Stacking

Future computing platforms will need to be flexible, scalable, and power-conservative, while saving size, weight, energy, etc. Heterogeneous architecture can address these challenges by allowing each application to run on a core that matches resource needs more closely than a one-size-fits-all core. Dynamic heterogeneous architectures can extend these benefits further, allowing the system to construct the right core at run-time for each application, borrowing or freeing resources only as needed by the particular application that is running. The key insight in the described design is that 3D stacking of cores eliminates the fundamental barrier to dynamic heterogeneity, allowing various resources belonging to different cores to be shared at run-time with minimal overhead.