1Dynamic Thread Extension for Speculative Multithreading Architectures

To reduce the effect of thread overheads when executing small threads in speculative mul-tithreading architectures, we propose a mechanism called Dynamic Thread Extension. This mechanism allows the hardware to dynamically combine two or more consecutive threads and treat them as a single thread. By having the compiler to estimate the size of threads, this mechanism can be implemented with minimal hardware support. Simulation results show that more an average of 13 % performance improvement can be achieved. 1