JMA: the Java-multithreading architecture for embedded processors

Abstract

Embedded processors are increasingly deployed in applications requiring high performance with good real-time characteristics whilst being low power. Parallelism has to be extracted in order to improve the performance at an architectural level. Extracting instruction level parallelism requires extensive speculation which adds complexity and increases power consumption. Alternatively, parallelism can be provided at the thread level. Many embedded applications can be written in a threaded manner in Java which can be directly translated to use hardware-level multithreaded operations. This paper presents an architectural study of JMA, a high-performance multithreaded architecture which supports Java-multithreading and realtime scheduling whilst remaining low-power.