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CODES
2008
IEEE

Speculative DMA for architecturally visible storage in instruction set extensions

13 years 9 months ago
Speculative DMA for architecturally visible storage in instruction set extensions
Instruction set extensions (ISEs) can accelerate embedded processor performance. Many algorithms for ISE generation have shown good potential; some of them have recently been expanded to include Architecturally Visible Storage (AVS)—compiler-controlled memories, similar to scratchpads, that are accessible only to ISEs. To achieve a speedup using AVS, Direct Memory Access (DMA) transfers are required to move data from the main memory to the AVS; unfortunately, this creates coherence problems between the AVS and the cache, which previous methods for ISEs with AVS failed to address; additionally, these methods need to leave many conservative DMA transfers in place, whose execution significantly limits the achievable speedup. This paper presents a memory coherence scheme for ISEs with AVS, which can ensure execution correctness and memory consistency with minimal area overhead. We also present a method that speculatively removes redundant DMA transfers. Cycle-accurate experimental resu...
Theo Kluter, Philip Brisk, Paolo Ienne, Edoardo Ch
Added 29 May 2010
Updated 29 May 2010
Type Conference
Year 2008
Where CODES
Authors Theo Kluter, Philip Brisk, Paolo Ienne, Edoardo Charbon
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