Performance Analysis of Caching Instructions on SVLIW Processor and VLIW Processor

SVLIW processor architectures can resolve resource collisions and data dependencies between the instructions while scheduling VLIW instructions at run-time. As a result, long NOP word instructions can be removed from the object code produced for the processor. Thus, the occurrence of cache misses on the SVLIW processor would be lesser than that on the same cache size VLIW processor. Less frequent cache misses on the SVLIW processor would incur less frequent memory access, and thus, the total execution cycles to complete an application would be shortened compared with cases on the VLIW processor. Such a feature eventually compromises effects of longer instruction pipeline stages than those of the VLIW processor. In this paper, we formulate and compare two execution cycle models of the two architectures. A simulation results show that the longer memory access cycles when cache miss occurs, the total execution cycles of SVLIW processor would be shorter than those of VLIW processor.