Processor's micro-architectural support for runtime environment
Paulo Garcia, Tiago Gomes, Filipe Salgado, Joao L. Monteiro, Jorge Cabral, Adriano Tavares · 2011
This paper presents a micro-architectural feature in a processor's datapath to support the C language's runtime environment. A hardware accelerator for C function calls was embedded in a processor core and its impact on area and performance was evaluated. Results show that the accelerator offers a performance improvement in several different processor configurations. The performance gain depends on the utilized processor configuration, especially on memory access contention.