Components

The basic elements that have both area and energy characteristics in Accelergy are components. We classify components with two levels of abstraction:

High-level functionality:

Either storage or compute, specified as the class of the component in the architecture specification. This information is particularly useful for Timeloop to perform architectural or coarse-grained microarchitectural evaluations.

Low-level implementation:

The exact hardware implementation used to enable the high-level functionality, specified as a subclass in the architecture specification (if no subclass specified, Accelergy uses the information carried by the class key). This information is particulary useful for Accelergy to generate accurate estimations based on the microarchitectural details. The microarchitectural implementations can be described in in terms of two types of component class:

  • Primitive Components - components whose characteristics are provided directly by Accelergy plugins
  • Compounds Components - components that are composed of a collection of primitive or other compound components.