While router buffers have been used as performance multipliers, they are also major consumers of area and power in on-chip networks. In this paper, we propose centralized elastic bubble router – a router micro-architecture based on the use of centralized buffers (CB) with elastic buffered (EB) links. At low loads, the CB is power gated, bypassed, and optimized to produce single cycle operation. A novel extension to bubble flow control enables routing deadlock and message dependent deadlock to be avoided with the same mechanism having constant buffer size per router independent of the number of message types. This solution enables end-to-end latency reduction via high radix switches with low overall buffer requirements. Comparisons made with other low latency routers across different topologies show consistent performance improvement, for example 26% improvement in no load latency of a 2D Mesh and 4X improvement in saturation throughput in a 2D-Generalized Hypercube.

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