Hyperblock formation: a power/energy perspective for high performance VLIW architectures

— Architectures based on Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors are an optimal choice in the attempt to obtain high performance levels in mobile devices. The effectiveness of these processors depends on the ability of compilers to provide sufficient instructionlevel parallelism (ILP) in program codes. The main factor limiting the possibility of obtaining high ILP levels is the presence of conditional branches, which prevent a VLIW compiler from scheduling instructions belonging to different paths in parallel. Hyperblock formation is the main compiling technique to solve this limit affecting ILP, transforming the code in such a way as to eliminate conditional branches. The paper presents an analysis of the effect of this technique, not only from the well-known perspective of performance gain but from that of power dissipation and energy consumption. The effect of hyperblock formation on these magnitudes is presented for a set of typical embedded multimedia applications, introdu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISCAS
• Authors: Giuseppe Ascia, Vincenzo Catania, Maurizio Palesi, Davide Patti
• Keywords: Conditional Branches, ISCAS 2005, Limit Affecting Ilp, Very Long Instruction Word