Title: Design and implementation of hybrid multicore simulators

Authors: Jun Yan, Wei Zhang

Addresses: Mathworks Inc., 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098, USA. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23284, USA

Abstract: Hybrid multicore architecture consisting of tightly-integrated very long instruction word (VLIW) and superscalar processors can potentially take advantage of the heterogeneity of different cores to attain better performance. However, to implement or simulate a hybrid multicore processor is a challenging task due to the interactions of tightly integrated cores with different architectures/microarchitectures. In this paper, we design and implement two hybrid multicore architecture simulators for multi-program and multicore (MPMC) paradigm and single-program and multicore (SPMC) respectively. Based on these simulators, we provide preliminary results to evaluate the performance of the hybrid multicore processor for both multi-threaded and single-threaded programs.

Keywords: multicore processors; very long instruction word; VLIW processors; superscalar processors; heterogeneous; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2010.039030

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2010 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.270 - 275

Published online: 11 Mar 2011 *

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