An Architecture Framework for Introducing Predicated Execution into Embedded Microprocessors (PostScript version, PDF version)
Daniel A. Connors, Jean-Michel Puiatti, David I. August,
Kevin M. Crozier, and Wen-mei W. Hwu
Proceedings of the 5th International Euro-Par Conference, August, 1999
Growing demand for high performance in embedded systems is creating
new opportunities for Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP) techniques
that are traditionally used in high performance systems. Predicated
execution, an important ILP technique, can be used to improve branch
handling, reduce frequently mispredicted branches, and expose
multiple execution paths to hardware resources. However, there is a
major tradeoff in the design of the instruction set, the addition of
a predicate operand for all instructions. We propose a new
architecture framework for introducing predicated execution to
embedded designs. Experimental results show a 10% performance
improvement and a code reduction of 25% over a traditionally
predicated architecture.
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