Specification of a coprocessor for efficient access of data structures

Most of todays applications are developed using high-level programming languages, which allow information to be represented as various types of data structures. However, the support provided by current architectures for accessing these types of data is very limited, Previous research proposed the use of an access coprocessor (AP). The authors define the access coprocessor instruction set, specify the access-execute processors synchronization protocols and illustrate the working of the system with three benchmark algorithms. Their results show that substantial speedup in program execution-time can be achieved by EP-AP concurrency and the use of special instructions by the AP to efficiently access data structures