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db_connect: Could not connect to paper db at "wotug@dragon.kent.ac.uk"
%T Synchronisation in a Multithreaded Processor
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%A Shondip Sen, Henk Muller, David May
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%E Peter H. Welch, Andr\[`e] W. P. Bakkers
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2000
%X A multithreaded architecture exploits instruction level
parallelism by interleaving instructions from disjoint
thread contexts. As each thread executes within its own
instruction stream with private data (the context
registers), there is no interdependency between instructions
from different threads. This allows high resource
utilisation of a super scalar pipelined processor at a very
low cost, in terms of complexity and silicon area. A new
synchronisation mechanism for a multithreaded architecture
is outlined. Two new instructions have been introduced to
perform one to one and n\-way synchronisation. The operation
allows synchronisations to be requested and actioned
efficiently on chip in as little as four clock cycles.
Barriers and CSP style channels can easily be constructed
with this new synchronisation instruction. A brief
examination of performance of this multithreaded
architecture shows that the optimum number of contexts per
multithreaded processing element is four, based on test
programs.