High-Performance Embedded Computing

2.4 Parallel Execution Mechanisms 77

In this section, we look at various ways that processors perform operations in

parallel. We consider very long instruction word and superscalar processing,

subword parallelism, vector processing, and thread-level parallelism. We end

this section with a brief consideration of the available parallelism in some

embedded applications.

2.4.1 Very Long Instruction Word Processors

Very long instruction word (VLIW) architectures were originally developed

as general-purpose processors but have seen widespread use in embedded sys-

tems. VLIW architectures provide instruction-level parallelism with relatively

low hardware overhead. ...