Introduction to Instruction-Set Customization

Over the last years, we have witnessed the increased use of customizable processors. These processors can be tuned and/or extended to meet specific requirements and to achieve a balance between performance, power, hardware resources and time-to-market. The problems involved are numerous and they tend to have high computational complexity. One of the main approaches is the identification of the most suitable instructions to include in the instruction-set. The customization of a given instruction-set with specialized application-specific instructions has become a common technique used to speed up the execution of applications. As a result, in this session we first present two papers focusing on methods to design custom instructions and then, a paper which gives an overview on contemporary architectures that offer dynamic instruction-set support.

Authors and Affiliations

1. TU Delft, The Netherlands

   Carlo Galuzzi

Editors and Affiliations

1. Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, 2628, Delft, CD, The Netherlands

   Koen Bertels  & Stephan Wong  & 

2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055, V8W 3P6, Victoria, BC, Canada

   Nikitas Dimopoulos

3. Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, P.za Leonardo Da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy

   Cristina Silvano

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