A preliminary performance study of architectural support for multithreading

This paper discusses the preliminary performance study of hybrid multithreaded execution model that combines software-controlled multithreaded system with hardware support for efficient context switching and threads scheduling. The hardware support for multithreading is augmented with a software thread scheduling technique called set scheduling, and their benefit to the overall performance is discussed. Set scheduling schedules multiple threads onto the hardware scheduler to minimize the software scheduling and context switching costs. An analytical model of the proposed multithreaded model is discussed and simulation results of processor utilization based on the proposed model are presented. Through simulation, we find that the hybrid multithreaded execution model results in high processor utilization than traditional software-controlled multithreading.