Performance impacts of caching I-structure data on frame-based multithreaded processing

Since long latency due to remote memory access or interprocessor communication could be tolerated in multithreaded processing, caching I-structure memory is expected to have less beneficial effect on the performance than caching ordinary data. The authors suggest an organization and an operation scheme of an I-structure cache in frame-based multithreading, and show quantitatively that caching I-structure memory could improve the overall performance, in spite of the latency tolerating property of multithreading. With I-structure caches, the performance impacts are three-fold: a reduction of average latency; an increase of quantum size; and enhancement of frame parallelism. Among them, the enhancement of frame parallelism seems most important.