dMT: inexpensive throughput enhancement in small-scale embedded microprocessors with differential multithreading

The authors examine differential multithreading (dMT) as an attractive organisation for increasing throughput in simple, small-scale, pipelined processors like those used in embedded environments. dMT copes with pipeline stalls due to hazards and data- and instruction-cache misses by using duplicated pipeline registers to run instructions from an alternate thread. Results show that dMT boosts throughput substantially and can in fact replace dynamic branch prediction or can be used to reduce the sizes of the instruction and data caches.