Application-specific configuration of multithreaded processor architecture for embedded applications

In the design of an embedded system, it is important to find an optimal architecture configuration according to the characteristics of the application so as to fully exploit the hardware resources. We consider simultaneous multithreaded processor as a processor core that runs the embedded application. In our simulation results, the performance enhancement by adopting SMT processor is dependent on the characteristics of each application. The application characteristics can be obtained by profiling it. We suggest a method that estimates SMT performance upper bound from the profile information. With the estimation results, we can find an optimal configuration without simulating all possible configurations.