School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh Institute for Computing Systems Architecture - School of Informatics
Institute for Computing
Systems Architecture

Code Transformation and Instruction Set Extensions

    Journal Paper - Code Transformation and Instruction Set Extensions
  • Type: Journal Paper
  • Authors:
    A.Murray, R.V. Bennett, B.Franke and N.P.Topham.
  • ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS '09), volume 8, issue 4, 2009.
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  • Abstract:

    The demand for flexible embedded solutions and short time-to-market has led to the development of extensible processors that allow for customization through user defined instruction set extensions (ISEs). These are usually identified from plain C sources. In this article we propose a combined exploration of code transformations and ISE identification. The resulting performance of such a combination has been measured on two benchmark suites. Our results demonstrate that combined code transformations and ISEs can yield average performance improvements of 49%. This outperforms ISEs when applied in isolation, and in extreme cases yields a speedup of 2.85.