Collaborative Multithreading: An Open Scalable Processor Architecture for Embedded Multimedia Applications

Numerous approaches can be employed in exploiting computation power in processors such as superscalar, VLIW, SMT and multi-core on chip. In this paper, a UniCore VisoMT processor is proposed, which unifies VLIW and multithreading by providing an efficient control and data communication model, while offering explicit parallelisms for embedded applications. The architecture concurrently executes a main thread and several accelerative threads, coordinated by the main thread. A switch-based register-file is provided for fast data exchange between these accelerative threads. Moreover, a SMT helper function unit is employed for controlling and resource-sharing between accelerative threads, and an event-driven mechanism is introduced for synchronization between the main thread and these accelerative threads. Our results show that the proposed architecture provides area and performance advantages for embedded multimedia applications