PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Tartan: Microarchitecting a Robotic Processor

ACM/IEEE 51st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA). June 29 - July 4, 2024, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Mohammad Bakhshalipour, Phillip B. Gibbons

Carnegie Mellon University

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

Abstract—This paper presents Tartan, a CPU architecture designed for a wide range of robotic applications. Tartan provides architectural support for common robotic kernels, ensuring its broad utility across different robotic tasks. The architecture effectively addresses both computational and memory bottlenecks, marking a significant advancement over previous works. Key features of Tartan include architectural support for oriented vectorization, approximate acceleration with accurate outcome, robotsemantic prefetching, and intra-application cache partitioning. On the six end-to-end robots in the RoWild Suite, Tartan boosts the performance of legacy robotic software by 1.2× (up to 1.4×), non-approximable software optimized for Tartan by 1.61× (up to 3.54×), and approximable software optimized for Tartan by 2.11× (up to 3.87×).

FULL PAPER: pdf