Support for dynamic issue width in VLIW processors using generic binaries

Different applications exhibit different behavior that cannot be optimally captured by a fixed organization of a VLIW processor. However, through exploitation of reconfigurable hardware we can optimize the organization when running different applications. In this paper, we propose a novel way to execute the same binary on different issue-width processors without much hardware modifications. We propose to change the compiler and assembler to ensure correct results. Our experiments show an average slowdown of around 1.3× when compared to binaries compiled for specific issue-widths. This can be further improved to less than 1.09× on average with additional compiler optimizations. Even though the flexibility comes at a price, it can be exploited for many other purposes, such as: dynamic performance/energy trade-off and energy-saving mechanisms, dynamic hardware sharing, and dynamic code insertion for hardware fault detection mechanisms.