A Feasibility Study on Programmer Specific Instruction Set Processors (PSISPs)

Abstract: ASIPs are designed in order to execute instructions of a particular domain of applications. The designing of ASIPs addresses the major challenges faced by a system on chip such as size, cost, performance and energy consumption. The higher the number of similar instructions within the domain to be mapped the lesser the energy consumption, the smaller the size and the higher the performance of the ASIP. Thus, designing processors for domains with more similar programs would overcome these issues. This paper describes the investigation of whether the domains of programmer specific programs have any significance like application specific program domains and thus, whether the approach of designing processors known as Programmer Specific Instruction Set Processors is worthwhile. We performed the evaluation at the instruction level by using four different measures to obtain the similarity of programs: (1) by the existence of each instruction, (2) by the frequency of each instruction, (3) by two consecutive instruction patterns and (4) by three consecutive instruction patterns of application specific and programmer specific programs. We found that although programmer specific instructions show some impact on the similarity measures, they are much smaller and therefore insignificant compared to the impact from application specific programs.