Exploring the Limits of Sub-Word Level Parallelism

Multimedia instruction set extensions have become a prominent feature in desktop microprocessor platforms, promising superior performance on a wide range of floating-point and integer signal processing, multimedia, and scientific applications. But the question remains whether or not these multimedia extensions can be applied to improve the performance of general, integer intensive applications. The answer to this question is important and could be used to direct research and development of compiler algorithms and refinements to multimedia architectures. In this paper we answer the question of whether integer programs exhibit enough sub-word level parallelism (SLP) to facilitate performance improvements through use of multimedia extensions. Using a highly optimizing compiler and a simulator for an aggressive SLP architecture, we measured available SLP in a range of integer benchmarks. Our measurements show that these applications exhibit significant levels of SLP. Using the most aggres...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: IEEEPACT
• Authors: Kevin Scott, Jack W. Davidson
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, IEEEPACT 2000, Integer, Multimedia, Multimedia Extensions