Automatically generating custom instruction set extensions

General-purpose processors that are utilized as cores are often incapable of achieving the challenging cost, performance, and power demands of high-performance audio, video, and networking applications. To meet these demands, most systems employ a number of hardware accelerators to off-load the computationally demanding portions of the application. As an alternative to this strategy, we examine customizing the computation capabilities of a core processor for a particular application. Our goal...