How Flexible is Your Computing System?

In literature, computer architectures are frequently claimed to be highly flexible, typically implying the existence of trade-offs between flexibility and performance or energy efficiency. Processor flexibility, however, is not very sharply defined, and consequently these claims cannot be validated, nor can such hypothetical relations be fully understood and exploited in the design of computing systems. This paper is an attempt to introduce scientific rigour to the notion of flexibility in computing systems. A survey is conducted to provide an overview of references to flexibility in literature, both in the computer architecture domain, as well as related fields. A classification is introduced to categorize different views on flexibility, which ultimately form the foundation for a qualitative definition of flexibility. Departing from the qualitative definition of flexibility, a generic quantifiable metric is proposed, enabling valid quantitative comparison of the flexibility of various architectures. To validate the proposed method, and evaluate the relation between the proposed metric and the general notion of flexibility, the flexibility metric is measured for 25 computing systems, including CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and FPGAs, and 40 ASIPs taken from literature. The obtained results provide insights into some of the speculative trade-offs between flexibility and properties such as energy efficiency and area efficiency. Overall the proposed quantitative flexibility metric shows to be commensurate with some generally accepted qualitative notions of flexibility collected in the survey, although some surprising discrepancies can also be observed. The proposed metric and the obtained results are placed into context of the state of the art on compute flexibility, and extensive reflection provides not only a complete overview of the field, but also discusses possible alternative approaches and open issues. Note that this work does not aim to provide a final answer to the definition of flexibility, but rather provides a framework to initiate a broader discussion in the computer architecture society on defining, understanding, and ultimately taking advantage of flexibility.