MulTEP: MultiThreaded Embedded Processors

Conventional embedded microprocessors have traditionally followed the footsteps of highend processor design to achieve high performance. Their underlying architectures prioritise tasks by time-critical interrupts and rely on software to perform scheduling tasks. Single threaded execution relies on instruction-based probabilistic techniques, such as speculative execution and branch prediction. These techniques might be unsuitable for embedded systems where real-time performance guarantees need to be met [1, 2]. Multithreading appears to be a feasible solution with potential for embedded processors [3]. The multithreaded model benefits from sequential characteristic of control-flow and concurrency characteristic of data-flow [4]. Thread-level parallelism has a potential to overcome the limitations of insufficient instruction-level parallelism to hide the increasing memory latencies. Earlier empirical studies on multithreaded processors [5, 4, 6, 7, 3] demonstrated that exploiting thread-level concurrency not only offers latency tolerance, but also provides predictable performance gain. A MulTithreaded Embedded Processor (MulTEP) is designed to provide high performance thread-level parallelism, real-time characteristics, a flexible number of thread