The Impact of Parallel and Multithread Mechanism on Network Processor Performance

Network processors are becoming a predominant feature in the field of network hardware due to its high performance and flexibility. The performance of network processor mainly depends on its architecture. This paper studied the parallel architecture and multithread mechanism in network processor. We discussed reasons of thread stalls and the principle of hiding latencies caused by various stalls using multithread mechanism. Lastly, we present the test results based on analyzing the relationship of active thread number and the performance of network processor