Loop unrolling in multi-pipeline ASIP design

Abstract

Application Specific Instruction-set Processor (ASIP) is one of the popular processor design techniques for embedded systems which allow customizability in processor design without overly hindering design flexibility. Multi-pipeline ASIPs were proposed to improve the performance of such systems by compromising between speed and processor area. One of the problems in the multi-pipeline design is the limited inherent instruction level parallelism (ILP) available in applications. The ILP of application programs can be improved via a compiler optimization technique known as loop unrolling. In this paper, we present the impact of loop unrolling on the performance (speed) of multi-pipeline ASIPs. The improvement in speed averages around 15% for a number of benchmark applications with the maximum improvement of around 30%. In addition, we report the variation of performance against the loop unrolling factor - the amount of unrolling performed on an application.