LOCUS: low-power customizable many-core architecture for wearables.

The requirements' demands of applications, such as real-time response, are pushing the wearable devices to leverage more power-efficient processors inside the SoC (System-on-chip). However, existing wearable devices are not well suited for such challenging applications due to poor performance, while the conventional powerful many-core architectures are not appropriate either due to the stringent power budget in this domain. We propose LOCUS - a low-power, customizable, many-core processor for next-generation wearable devices. LOCUS combines customizable processor cores with a customizable network on a message-passing architecture to deliver very competitive performance/watt - an average 3.1x compared to quad-core ARM processors used in the state-of-the-art wearable devices. A combination of full-system simulation with representative applications from wearable domain and RTL synthesis of the architecture show that 16-core LOCUS achieves an average 1.52x performance/watt improvement over a conventional 16-core shared-memory many-core architecture.