Automatically generating custom instruction set extensions

General-purpose processors that are utilized as cores are of-ten incapable of achieving the challenging cost, performance, and power demands of high-performance audio, video, and networking applications. To meet these demands, most sys-tems employ a number of hardware accelerators to off-load the computationally demanding portions of the application. As an alternative to this strategy, we examine customizing the com-putation capabilities of a core processor for a particular ap-plication. Our goal is to enable some or all of the compu-tation that is off-loaded to the accelerators to be taken over by the customized core. The computation capabilities of the core processor are extended with hardware in the form of a set custom function units and new instructions. The compiler is responsible for analyzing the target application and identify-ing a set of cost-effective custom function units. In this paper, we provide an overview of the system that we are developing to automatically identify instruction set extensions and report some preliminary analysis of four media benchmarks. 1