Impact of Hardware/Software Partitioning and MicroBlaze FPGA Configurations on the Embedded Systems Performances - Complex System Modelling and Control Through Intelligent Soft Computations - page 715

bottlenecks of such system. Performance measurement adjusts the application if its
source code or algorithms can still be changed in order to understand the applica-
tions. This application can run on the system and tune the different design con

g-
urations. This kind of performance evaluation approach can be done using the
following means:

Microprocessor on-chip performance monitoring: can be used to understand
performance of high microprocessors (Intel

￿

' s Pentium III and Pentium IV, IBM

Power3 and Power4 processors, AMD s

Ultra SPARC). Several tools are available to measure performance monitoring
counters: Intel

' s Athlon, Compaq ' s Alpha and Sum '

s Vtune software can be used to perform measurement when the
Intel performance counters. The P6Pref utility presents a plug-in for Windows
NT performance monitoring. The Compaq DIGITAL Continuous Pro

'

ling

Infrastructure (DCPI) presents a very powerful tool used to pro le program on

the Alpha processors.

Off-Chip hardware monitoring: Instrumentation using hardware wherewithal
can be done by attaching off-chip hardware. Example Speed Tracer from AMD
and Logic analyser. AMD developed hardware-trading platform to help in the
design of X86 microprocessors. However, Poursepanj and Christie used a logic
analyser to analyze 3D graphics workloads on AMD-K6-2 based systems.

￿

Software monitoring: is an important mode of performance evaluation used
before the advent of on-chip performance monitoring counters. The primary
advantage of software monitoring is that it is easy to execute.

￿

Mircocoded instrumentation: is a technique lying between trapping information
on each instruction using hardware interrupts (traps) or software interrupts
(traps). The tracing system modi

￿

ed the VAX microcode to record all instruc-
tions and data references in a reserved portion of memory.

5.1.3 CPU Benchmarks

Designers of FPGA processor have to use the CPU Benchmarks approach to get a

performance, which is attempting to imple-
ment and verify the architectural and the timing behavior under a set of benchmark
programs. Several open sources and commercial benchmarks are presented. Some
of them are: Mibench, Paranoia, LINPACK, SPEC (Standard Performance Evalu-
ation Corporation), and EEMBC (Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consor-
tium). These Benchmarks are divided into three categories depending on the
application (Korb and Noll 2010 ). The

fixed measurement of the processors '

first category is Synthetic Benchmark (with
the intention to measure one or more features of systems, processors, or compilers).
The second category is application based benchmarks or

“ real world ” benchmarks

(developed to compare different processors fields of

applications). Finally, the third category is Algorithm Based Benchmarks (devel-
oped to compare systems architectures in special (synthetic)

' architectures in the same

fields of application).