Evaluation of Different Multithreaded and Multicore Processor Configurations for SoPC

Multicore processors get more and more popular, even in embedded systems. Unfortunately, these types of processors require a special kind of programming technique to offer their full performance, i.e. they require a high thread-level parallelism. In this paper we evaluate the performance of different configurations of the same processor core within an SoPC: a single threaded single core, a multithreaded single core, a single threaded multicore, and a multithreaded multicore. The used core is the jamuth core, a multithreaded Java processor able to execute Java bytecode directly in hardware. The advantage of Java in a multicore environment is that it brings the threading concept for free, i.e. the software developers are familiar with the threading concept. Our evaluations show that the cores within a multicore processor should be at least two-threaded to bridge the higher memory delays caused by the contention at the shared bus.