Improving Code Layout Can Improve Application Performance

Darryl Gove, June 22, 2005

Introduction

Large applications have a particular problem: they have a lot of instructions, and the processor does not have the capacity to hold the entire application on-chip at any one time. As a consequence, larger applications spend some of their run time stalled, with the processor waiting to fetch new instructions from memory. This paper discusses several techniques that help the processor to hold more useful instructions on-chip, consequently reducing the time that is wasted fetching data from memory.