Advantages Compared To Single Threaded Processors
A single-tasking processor spends a lot of time idle, not doing anything useful whenever a cache miss or pipeline stall occurs. Advantages to employing barrel processors over single-tasking processors include:
- The ability to do useful work on the other threads while the stalled thread is waiting.
- Designing an n-way barrel processor with n-deep pipelines is much simpler than designing a single-tasking processor because a barrel processor never has a pipeline stall and doesn't need feed-forward circuits.
- For real-time applications, a barrel processor can guarantee that a "real-time" thread can execute with precise timing, no matter what happens to the other threads—even if some other thread locks up in an infinite loop or is continuously interrupted by hardware interrupts.
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