Embedded Multi-Processor System Topics
Embedded Multi-Processor System Topics
improvements in Multi-Processor
systems
1- Even though the current approaches are quite effective for single-processor based
systems, they are not applicable, in many cases, to multi-cores and have to be revised to
effectively utilize the benefits of Chip Multi-Processors (CMP).
2- In recent years, researches have directed their attention to on-chip memory
components such as Scratch Pad Memory (SPM) in addition to hardware-controlled onchip caches to be able to meet very tight constraints, especially embedded systems. SPM
is a software-managed on-chip SRAM with guaranteed fast access time. The advantages
of SPM include power/energy efficiency, reduced cost, better performance, and real-time
predictability.
3- Performance improvement examples:
a. Memory space: Reducing data memory space consumption of embedded applications:
the idea is to reduce memory space requirements by performing extra recomputations instead of indiscriminately(ba bi, u) storing all intermediate results in
memory.
b. Power improvement:
c. Throughput:
d. Execution time: run-time performance vs storage performance
e. Example about system specification: multiple heterogeneous processors and a shared
memory. The processor cores are assumed to be embedded in a single die and they are
connected using share bus. The communication between the processors and the memory
system is conducted via the memory interface and the bus structure.
In above structure, 2 processor cores (CPUs) are embedded into a single chip. Using
graph-based model, called the task graph, to describe the system specification. A task
graph is a directed-acyclic graph where the vertices represent the tasks and the edges
represent the dependencies among these tasks. A directed edge between 2 tasks
captures the fact that there is a data transfer between them. In any scheduling approach,
we have to make sure that a task is scheduled only after all its input data are available
from its predecessors. Below task graph is illustrating the trade-off between performance
and memory consumption: