Performance evaluation of register allocator for the advanced DSP of TMS320C80

PPCA is an assembly language-level register allocator and instruction compactor for the advanced DSPs (ADSPs) of the TMS320C80 digital signal processor. It was developed to help the implementation of time-critical ADSP assembly programs which heavily utilize powerful ADSP features optimized for multimedia and image computing applications for maximum efficiency. PPCA takes as an input ADSP assembly operations with symbolic variables. It then allocates the ADSP's physical registers to the symbolic variables and rearranges the operations into a highly-parallelized compact format. In this paper, we have evaluated the performance of a register allocation capability of PPCA using an extensive image computing library for the TMS320C80. We present the basic algorithm of the PPCA's register allocation module and describe the performance evaluation approach used. The result shows that PPCA essentially achieves optimal register allocation for the test cases based on the image computing library functions.