An Empirical Study of the Performance of a Simulated Multithreaded Processor.
Martin T. Rowland, Randall A. Helzerman · 1995
Because dependencies limit the amount of parallelism in an instruction stream, a VLIW or superscalar processor typically cannot execute as many instructions each cycle as it has functional units. This otherwise wasted processing power can be harnessed in a multithreaded architecture, which exploits the independence of instructions from separate processes. If a multithreaded processor finds that the current process can not use a functional unit, it looks for an instruction from another ready process which can. This paper presents the results of an empirical study that measures the effectiveness on throughput of multithreaded processing when applied to a super scalar architecture.