• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.1-10
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• 2013

In this paper, the parallel branch instruction is proposed which executes a branch instruction and the frequently used instruction simultaneously to improve the performance of Thumb-2 instruction set architecture. In the proposed approach, new 32-bit parallel branch instructions are introduced which combine 16-bit branch instruction with each of the frequently used 16-bit LOAD, ADD, MOV, STORE, and SUB instructions, respectively. To provide the encoding space of the new instructions, the register field in less frequently executed instructions is reduced, and the new instructions are encoded by using the saved bits. Experiments show that the proposed approach improves performance by an average of 8.0% when compared to the conventional approach.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.1-9
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• 2016

Recent embedded processors employ set-associative L1 instruction cache to improve the performance. The energy consumption in the set-associative L1 instruction cache accounts for considerable portion in the embedded processor. When an instruction is required from the processor, all ways in the set-associative instruction cache are accessed in parallel. In this paper, we propose the technique to reduce the energy consumption in the set-associative L1 instruction cache effectively by accessing only one way. Gshare branch predictor is employed to predict the instruction flow and determine the way to fetch the instruction. When the branch prediction is untaken, next instruction in a sequential order can be fetched from the instruction cache by accessing only one way. According to our simulations with SPEC2006 benchmarks, the proposed technique requires negligible hardware overhead and shows 20% energy reduction on average in 4-way L1 instruction cache.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.30B no.11
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• pp.11-16
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• 1993

VLIW architecture capable of testing multiple conditions in a cycle must support an efficient mechanism for multi-way branches. This paper proposes a mechanism to speed up the execution of multi-way branches and an efficient memory packing method of instructions, which reduced the wasted memory space. Also, we develops a new compiler technique which can transform program segments that are not applied to multi-way branches into ones that are applied to multi-way branches. The benefits gained by the transformation are to reduce branch penalty and to increase instruction-level parallelism.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.23 no.8
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• pp.498-503
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• 2017

SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) is a representative parallelization architecture that processes multiple data loaded in a SIMD register with a single instruction. Quicksort is a sorting algorithm that picks an element as a pivot from the array and reorders the array such that all elements having the values less than the pivot value are located in the left side on the pivot as well as all elements having the value greater than the pivot value are located in the right side on the pivot and then the algorithm performs the same task on both sublist recursively. In this paper, we propose an efficient Quicksort algorithm applying the SIMD instructions which minimally invokes conditional branches to avoid the performance degradation incurred by branch misprediction in a pipeline architecture. In addition, we improve the performance of the Quicksort algorithm by fetching data into a SIMD register as a byte unit to apply VBP (Vertical Bit Parallel) and the early pruning technique.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.9-21
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• 2013

Due to increased computing power and flexibility of GPU, recent GPUs execute general purpose parallel applications as well as graphics applications. Programmers can use GPGPU by using the APIs from GPU vendors. Unfortunately, computational resources of GPU are not fully utilized when executing general purpose applications because of frequent branch instructions. To handle the branch problem, several warp formations have been proposed. Intuitively, we expect that the warp formations providing higher computational resource utilization show higher performance. Contrary to our expectations, according to simulation results, the performance of the warp formation providing better utilization is lower than that of the warp formation providing worse utilization. This is because warp formation providing high utilization causes serious memory bottleneck due to increased memory request. Therefore, warp formation providing high computation utilization cannot guarantee high performance without proper hardware resources. For this reason, we will analyze the correlation between hardware configuration and warp formation. Our simulation results present the guideline to solve the underutilization problem due to branch instructions when designing recent GPU.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.48 no.10
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• pp.82-90
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• 2011

Because of the development of Smart phone devices, the demands of high performance FPU(Floating-point Unit) becomes increasing. Therefore, we propose the high-speed single-/double-precision FPU design that includes an elementary add/sub unit and improved multiplier and compare and convert units. The most commonly used add/sub unit is optimized by the parallel rounding unit. The matrix operation is used in complex calculation something like a graphic calculation. We designed the Multiply-Add Fused(MAF) instead of multiplier to calculate the matrix more quickly. The branch instruction that is decided by the compare operation is very frequently used in various programs. We bypassed the result of the compare operation before all the pipeline processes ended to decrease the total execution time. And we included additional convert operations that are added in IEEE754-2008 standard. To verify our RTL designs, we chose four hundred thousand test vectors by weighted random method and simulated each unit. The FPU that was synthesized by Samsung's 45-nm low-power process satisfied the 600-MHz operation frequency. And we confirm a reduction in area by comparing the improved FPU with the existing FPU.