System-on-a-chip (soc) based fast path enabler for data applications

Abstract

In a typical data plane application, there is a packet dispatcher which receives packets from the underlying subsystem for distribution among various threads/processes for further processing. These threads/processes may run on various processing elements (PEs) and pass through multiple stages of processing. As new generation system-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures have multiple heterogeneous clusters with corresponding PEs, packet processing may traverse through multiple PEs in different clusters. Since latencies/performance for different clusters/PEs may be different, packet processing on the SoC may take a variable amount of time, which may lead to unpredictable latencies. The present disclosure provides embodiments to solve the problem of packet processing on heterogeneous clusters/PEs by providing a fast path enabler to the applications for SoC architecture awareness. The fast path enabler understands the cache topology of the SoC and may pre-fetch packets to the desired cache to minimize latencies for improved performance.