Low-Power VLIW Processors: A High-Level Evaluation

Processors having both low-power consumption and high-performance are more and more required in the portable systems market. Although it is easy to nd processors with one of these characteristics, it is harder to nd a processor having both of them at the same time. In this paper, we evaluate the possibility of designing a high-performance, low-consumption processor and investigate whether instruction-level parallelism architectures can be adapted to low-power processors. We nd that an adaptation of high-performance architecture, such as the VLIW architecture, to low-power 8b or 16b microprocessors yields a signiicant improvement in the processor's performance while keeping the same energy consumption.