Effect of Thread Level Parallelism on the Performance of Optimum Architecture for Embedded Applications

Abstract: According to the increasing complexity of network application and internet traffic, network processor as a subset of embedded processors have to process more computation intensive tasks. By scaling down the feature size and emersion of chip multiprocessors (CMP) that are usually multi-thread processors, the performance requirements are somehow guaranteed. As multithread processors are the heir of uni-thread processors and there isn't any general design flow to design a multithread embedded processor, in this paper we perform a comprehensive design space exploration for an optimum uni-thread embedded processor based on the limited area and power budgets. Finally we run multiple threads on this architecture to find out the maximum thread level parallelism (TLP) based on performance per power and area optimum uni-thread architecture.