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Hardware specialization is an increasingly common technique to enable improved performance and energy efficiency in spite of the diminished benefits of technology scaling. This paper proposes a new approach called explicit loop specialization (XLOOPS) based on the idea of elegantly encoding inter-iteration loop dependence patterns in the instruction set. XLOOPS supports a variety of inter-iteration dataand control-dependence patterns for both single and nested loops. The XLOOPS hardware/software abstraction requires only lightweight changes to a general-purpose compiler to generate XLOOPS binaries and enables executing these binaries on:(1) traditional microarchitectures with minimal performance impact, (2) specialized microarchitectures to improve performance and/or energy efficiency, and (3) adaptive microarchitectures that can seamlessly migrate loops between traditional and specialized execution to dynamically trade-off performance vs. energy efficiency. We evaluate XLOOPS using a vertically integrated research methodology and show compelling performance and energy efficiency improvements compared to both simple and complex general-purpose processors.

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