Multithreaded processors: the upcoming generation for multimedia chips

Long latencies in multimedia systems can cause a significant drop in processor utilization. By maintaining multiple process contexts in hardware and switching among them in few cycles, multithreaded processors can overlap computation with memory accesses and reduce processor idle time. This survey presents state-of-the-art in this field. It studies the motivations of multithreading. By concentrating on concepts rather than implementation details, this study addresses a number of multithreading design issues. These issues comprise a wide range of items from hardware to operating systems, and compilers to other software issues.