ABSTRACT:
Long latencies in multimedia systems can cause a significant drop in
processor utilization. By maintaining multiple process contexts in hardware
and switching among them in few cycles, multithreaded processors can overlap
computation with memory accesses and reduce processor idle time. This survey
presents state-of-the-art in this field. It studies the motivations of
multithreading. Concentrating on concepts rather than implementation
details, this study addresses a number of multithreading design issues.
These issues comprise a wide range of items from hardware to operating
systems, and compilers to other software issues.