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EURO-DAC '96/EURO-VHDL '96 Proceedings of the conference on European design automation
The SimpleScalar tool set, version 2.0
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
Processor Architecture: From Dataflow to Superscalar and Beyond
Processor Architecture: From Dataflow to Superscalar and Beyond
NetBench: a benchmarking suite for network processors
Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
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NpBench: A Benchmark Suite for Control plane and Data plane Applications for Network Processors
ICCD '03 Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Design
Application-specific instruction generation for configurable processor architectures
FPGA '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM/SIGDA 12th international symposium on Field programmable gate arrays
Area-efficient instruction set synthesis for reconfigurable system-on-chip designs
Proceedings of the 41st annual Design Automation Conference
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Proceedings of the 41st annual Design Automation Conference
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IBM Journal of Research and Development
Network Application Driven Instruction Set Extensions for Embedded Processing Clusters
PARELEC '04 Proceedings of the international conference on Parallel Computing in Electrical Engineering
Scalable custom instructions identification for instruction-set extensible processors
Proceedings of the 2004 international conference on Compilers, architecture, and synthesis for embedded systems
Automated Custom Instruction Generation for Domain-Specific Processor Acceleration
IEEE Transactions on Computers
FlexPath NP: a network processor concept with application-driven flexible processing paths
CODES+ISSS '05 Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
CommBench-a telecommunications benchmark for network processors
ISPASS '00 Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software
Computer Architecture, Fourth Edition: A Quantitative Approach
Computer Architecture, Fourth Edition: A Quantitative Approach
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Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
A Genetic-Driven Instruction Set for High Speed Network Processors
AICCSA '06 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications
Rapid design of area-efficient custom instructions for reconfigurable embedded processing
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface
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Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
Exact and approximate algorithms for the extension of embedded processor instruction sets
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
CHIPS: Custom Hardware Instruction Processor Synthesis
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
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This paper presents instruction set architectural guidelines for improving general-purpose embedded processors to optimally accommodate packet-processing applications. Similar to other embedded processors such as media processors, packet-processing engines are deployed in embedded applications, where cost and power are as important as performance. In this domain, the growing demands for higher bandwidth and performance besides the ongoing development of new networking protocols and applications call for flexible power- and performance-optimized engines. The instruction set architectural guidelines are extracted from an exhaustive simulation-based profile-driven quantitative analysis of different packet-processing workloads on 32-bit versions of two well-known general-purpose processors, ARM and MIPS. This extensive study has revealed the main performance challenges and tradeoffs in development of evolution path for survival of such general-purpose processors with optimum accommodation of packet-processing functions for future switching-intensive applications. Architectural guidelines include types of instructions, branch offset size, displacement and immediate addressing modes for memory access along with the effective size of these fields, data types of memory operations, and also new branch instructions. The effectiveness of the proposed guidelines is evaluated with the development of a retargetable compilation and simulation framework. Developing the HDL model of the optimized base processor for networking applications and using a logic synthesis tool, we show that enhanced area, power, delay, and power per watt measures are achieved.