Increasing the efficiency of an embedded multi-core bytecode processor using an object cache

Abstract

The Java platform promotes the fast development of complex software. For the efficient execution of Java code in embedded systems, multi-core Java processors offer a promising implementation option that is directly capable to exploit thread-level concurrency available in a Java application. This paper explores measures to relieve the critical heap memory interface, which regularly limits the achievable speedup. The described object cache with a supplementing translation lookaside buffer is shown to double the effective speedup in concurrent applications constrained by the memory bandwidth. The investment into additional hardware resources proves to be moderate.