A multithreaded extension to the OR1200 processor

Multithreading is a promising technique that widely used in general purpose processors to hide long latency events such as cache misses. This paper proposes an embedded processor design with multithreading support based on the OR1200 processor. The multithreaded OR1200 processor supports interleaved execution of four threads in a round-robin way. The hardware design is evaluated through RTL-simulation of the verilog code. Results show that the interleaved execution of multiple threads can tolerate the memory latency effectively and an average speed-up of 1.16 can be achieved.