Hardware & Software Co-Design for High Performance System
Hao Zhang · Computer Engineering and Science · 2009
x86 is the most widely used ISA currently,but compared with RISC,is very complex.The obstacles in designing an x86 processing systems(most of them are uncommon characters) need lots of additional hardware resources,and supporting directly with hardware does no good for the utilization of hardware resources.This paper analyzes the characters of x86 ISA and applications deeply,and propose a software/hardware co-design method based on RISC superscalar processing systems.The area of our co-design processing system is about 78.3% of an x86 processing system with hardware decoder,but performance of our design is about 90.6% of the same processing system with hardware decoder.