X-CEL: A Method to Estimate Near-Memory Acceleration Potential in Tile-Based MPSoCs

Near-memory acceleration strives to tackle the data-to-task locality issue in MPSoCs in order to obtain higher performance and lower power consumption. However, it is not easy to determine whether the advantages arise from the near-memory integration or the hardware acceleration (versus software execution). We propose X-CEL, a method to accurately estimate the potential of near-memory acceleration using an easy-to-integrate near-memory core. We showcase X-CEL’s benefits with three variants of graph copy mechanisms in a tile-based MPSoC. Evaluations reveal that the estimated speedup is in good accordance with the actual speedup achieved by the near-memory accelerator.