Abstract

Stream processing has emerged as an important model of computation especially in the context of multimedia and communication sub-systems of embedded System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. The dataflow nature of streaming applications allows them to be most naturally expressed as a set of kernels iteratively operating on continuous streams of data. The kernels are computationally intensive and are mainly character-ized by real-time constraints that demand high throughput and data bandwidth with limited global data reuse. Conventional architectures fail to meet these demands due to their poorly matched execution models and the overheads associated with instruction and data movements. This work presents StreamWorks, a multi-core embedded architecture for energy-efficient stream computing. The basic processing element in the StreamWorks ar-chitecture is the StreamEngine (SE) which is responsible for iteratively executing a stream kernel. SE introduces an instruction locking mechanism that exploits the iter-ative nature of the kernels and enables fine-grain instruction reuse. Each instruction