The Design of a Hardware Thread Manager for a Polymorphic Multimedia Processor

This paper proposes a hardware thread manager for the polymorphic parallel processor. The thread manager supports the MIMD mode with 8 threads and SIMD mode with multiple threads using the SIMD controllers in a unified approach to manage two operating modes to achieve a mixture of three types of parallel computation. Thread manager monitors the progress of each thread, the activity of near neighbor shared memory and the status of the router. It schedules the execution slots for the threads. It can start and stop a thread, put a thread on wait, resume the execution of a thread. Thread manager can also record the working status of each thread, while avoiding the waiting problem caused by data availability. This manager is able to maximize the efficiency of a processing element in a polymorphic array processor.