Paper Info
Title
A low cost split-issue technique to improve performance of SMT clustered VLIW processors
Abstract
Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors are a popular choice in embedded domain due to their hardware simplicity, low cost and low power consumption. Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT) is a popular technique for improving processor performance. To maintain execution semantics, a VLIW instruction needs to be issued in entirety, which restricts the opportunities in SMT. Split-issue at operation-level is a technique that allows issuing a VLIW instruction in parts without breaking execution semantics. Issuing an instruction in parts allows non-conflicting part of an instruction to be issued along with other instructions and improves SMT performance. However, implementing split-issue at operation-level requires complex structures and is not practical for an embedded VLIW processor. This paper proposes cluster-level split-issue, which implements split-issue at a cluster-level boundary for clustered VLIW processors. Cluster-level split-issue has a very low hardware overhead in contrast to split-issue at operation-level. Experimental results show that cluster-level split-issue, despite being more restrictive than split-issue at operation-level, achieves similar performance and improves SMT performance significantly.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/IPDPS.2010.5470351
Parallel & Distributed Processing
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
embedded systems,instruction sets,multi-threading,multiprocessing systems,parallel architectures,parallel machines,smt clustered vliw processors,cluster-level split-issue,embedded vliw processor,embedded domain,execution semantics,hardware simplicity,low cost split-issue technique,low power consumption,processor performance improvement,simultaneous multithreading,very long instruction word processors,clustered vliw processors,multithreading,multi threading
Conference
1530-2075
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4244-6442-5
1
0.39
References 
Authors
10
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Manoj Gupta17612.47
Fermín Sánchez2235.45
Josep Llosa310.39