Performance Improvement of SVLIW Architectures by Removing LNOPs from An Object Code

SVLIW (Superscalar VLIW) processor, a family of VLIW processors schedules very long instruction words at runtime. If a very long instruction word that is to be issued occurs data dependence relations and/or resource conflicts with those words that were under execution, a long NOP word is issued instead of the word until all the data dependence relations and/or resource conflicts have been resolved. Thus, LNOPs can be removed in object codes for SVLIW processors. In this paper, we measure an improvement of the cache hit ratio caused by removing LNOPs in the object code. We also analyze an improvement of the processor performance due to higher cache hit ratio of the processor. Benchmark tests promise that the performance of SVLIW processors is improved more than 5% compared with that of traditional VLIW processors.