Construction and exploitation of VLIW asips with multiple vector-widths

Abstract

Many applications in important domains, such as communication, multimedia, etc. show a significant data-level parallelism (DLP). A large part of the DLP is usually exploited through application vectorization and implementation of vector operations in processors executing the applications. While the amount of DLP varies between applications of the same domain or even within a single application, processor architectures usually support a single vector width. This may not be optimal and may cause a substantial energy and performance inefficiency. Therefore, an adequate more sophisticated exploitation of DLP is highly relevant. This paper studies the construction and exploitation of VLIW ASIPs with multiple vector widths.