Silly Science

XMOS XS-1 Virtual Threads

The XMOS XS-1 architecture is a multi-threaded architecture. As opposed to normal systems it has a single processor core that can run 8 hardware threads, in real-time with no operating system overhead. But what happens if you run out of threads… 2 answers: either (1) add more cores or (2) virtualize.

So I thought I would do option (2) as option (1) is too easy in the XMOS architecture and its not very efficient if I want to run 1MIPs processes on a thread that has 50MIPs available. The code for this is freely available from the virtual threads sourceforge page.

More information after the break…

Continue reading →