14. Advanced SPU Topics: Overlays, Software Caching, and SPU Isolation
All the SPU’s vital capabilities have been discussed: Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) processing, direct memory access (DMA), and channel communication. This chapter presents three topics that aren’t as commonly used, but may prove important as you code more advanced SPU applications: overlays, software caching, and SPU isolation.
Overlays allow SPU applications to dynamically incorporate code stored outside the local store (LS). They are frequently used in embedded systems, where application sizes may exceed the amount of available local memory. Applications with overlays are easy to code, but the overlay information has to be placed in the linker script.
Each SPU ...
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