On the Benefits of Speculative Trace Scheduling in VLIW Processors

VLIW processors are statically scheduled processors and their performance depends on the quality of the compiler’s scheduler. We propose a scheduling scheme where the application is first divided into decision trees and then further split into traces. We have developed a tool “SpliTree” to generate traces automatically. Using dynamic branch prediction for selecting the root of the decision tree from which the traces are scheduled using our scheme, we obtain approximately 1.4x performance improvement over that using decision trees for Spec92int benchmarks simulated on TriMedia processor.