Discussion and ideas on Heterogeneous-ISA paper------- Binod Kumar

The execution migration overhead technique can be employed for designing and
synthesizing a dynamic core, to acheive energy savings in the case of single-thread
execution. The essential requirement is a minor modification in the front-end (i.e., having
decoders corresponding to each ISA). This can help acheive an energy-efficient single core
without compromising on performance.The major benefit with this approach will be in
terms of a reduced migration overhead since we are forbiding the inter-core migration.
Similar to the concept of the concept of composite core, the implementation of this dynamic
core can be attempted.

For SMT kind of architectures, this concept can be applied in a similar fashion where in
different decoders and private (corresponding to each ISA) fetch units are present.
Whenever parallelization is possible, the program can be executed simultaneously on
different ISA's and afer that, the execution resumes to single-ISA operation.

To handle the problem of execution migration, we can design a scheduler which can
automatically switch from one ISA to another based on affinity of an application towards a
particular ISA. This requires performance modeling of one ISA and estimation of
parameters of the run of the execution on other ISA which assists in the execution
migration of the application.