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Virtual Prototyping and Performance Analysis of Two Memory Architectures

Abstract

The gap between CPU and memory speed has always been a critical concern that motivated researchers to study and analyze the performance of memory hierarchical architectures. In the early stages of the design cycle, performance evaluation methodologies can be used to leverage exploration at the architectural level and assist in making early design tradeoffs. In this paper, we use simulation platforms developed using the VisualSim tool to compare the performance of two memory architectures, namely, the Direct Connect architecture of the Opteron, and the Shared Bus of the Xeon multicore processors. Key variations exist between the two memory architectures and both design approaches provide rich platforms that call for the early use of virtual system prototyping and simulation techniques to assess performance at an early stage in the design cycle.

1. Introduction

Due to the rapid advances in circuit integration technology, and to optimize performance while maintaining acceptable levels of energy efficiency and reliability, multicore technology or Chip-Multiprocessor is becoming the technology of choice for microprocessor designers. Multicore processors provide increased total computational capability on a single chip without requiring a complex microarchitecure. As a result, simple multicore processors have better performance per watt and area characteristics than complex single core processors [1].

A multicore architecture has a single processor package that contains two or more processors. All cores can execute instructions independently and simultaneously. The operating system will treat each of the execution cores as a discrete processor. The design and integration of such processors with transistor counts in the millions poses a challenge to designers given the complexity of the task and the time to market constraints. Hence, early virtual system prototyping and performance analysis provides designers with critical information that can be used to evaluate various architectural approaches, functionality, and processing requirements.

In these emerging multicore architecture, the ability to analyze (at an early stage) the performance of the memory subsystem is of extreme importance to designers. The latency resulting by the access of different levels of memory reduces the processing speeds causing more processor stalls while the data/instruction is being fetched from the main memory. Ways in which multiple cores send and receive data to the main memory greatly affect the access time and thus the processing speed. In multicore processors, two approaches to memory subsystem design have emerged in recent years, namely, the AMD DirectConnect architecture and the Intel Shared Bus architecture [2–5]. In the DirectConnect architecture, a processor is directly connected to a pool of memory using an integrated memory controller. A processor can access the other processors' memory pool via a dedicated processor-to-processor interconnect. On the other hand, in Intel's dual-core designs, a single shared pool of memory is at the heart of the memory subsystem. All processors access the pool via an external front-side bus and a memory controller hub.

In this work, virtual system prototyping is used to study the performance of these alternatives. A virtual systems prototype is a software-simulation-based, timing-accurate, electronic systems level (ESL) model, used first at the architectural level and then as an executable golden reference model throughout the design cycle. Virtual systems prototyping enables developers to accurately and efficiently make the painful tradeoffs between that quarrelling family of design siblings functionality, flexibility, performance, power consumption, quality, cost, and so forth.

Virtual prototyping can be used early in the development process to better understand hardware and software partitioning decisions and determine throughput considerations associated with implementations. Early use of functional models to determine microprocessor hardware configurations and architectures, and the architecture of ASIC in development, can aid in capturing requirements, improving functional performance and expectations [6].

In this work, we explore the performance of the two memory architectures introduced earlier using virtual prototyping models built from parameterized library components which are part of the VisualSim Environment [7]. Essentially, VisualSim is a modeling and simulation CAD tool used to study, analyze, and validate specification and verify implementation at early stages of the design cycle.

This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 we provide an overview of the two processors and the corresponding memory architectures. Section 3 introduces the VisualSim environment as well as the creation of the platform models for the processors. Simulation Results and the analysis of these results form Section 4 of this paper. Conclusions are summarized in Section 5.

2. Overview of Processors Memory Architecture

2.1. The AMD Opteron Direct Connect Architecture

The AMD's direct Connect Architecture used in the design of the dual core AMD Opteron consists of three elements:

(i)an integrated memory controller within each processor, which connects the processor cores to dedicated memory,

(ii)a high-bandwidth Hyper Transport Technology link which goes out the computer's I/O devices, such as PCI controllers,

(iii)coherent Hyper Transport Technology links which allow one processor to access another processor's memory controller and Hyper Transport Technology links.

The Opteron uses an innovative routing switch and a direct connect architecture that allows "glueless" multiprocessing between the two processor cores. Figure 1 shows an Opteron processor along with the system request queue (SRQ) and host bridge, Crossbar, memory controller, DRAM controller, and HyperTransport ports [3, 8].

Figure 1
figure 1

AMD dual core Opteron.

The Crossbar switch and the SRQ are connected to the cores directly and run at the processor core frequency. After an L1 cache miss, the processor core sends a request to the main memory and the L2 cache in parallel. The main memory request is discarded in case of an L2 cache hit. An L2 cache miss results in the request being sent to the main memory via the SRQ and the Crossbar switch. The SRQ maps the request to the nodes that connect the processor to the destination. The Crossbar switch routes the request/data to the destination node or the HyperTransport port in case of an off chip access.

Each Opteron core has a local on-chip L1 and L2 cache and is then connected to the memory controller via the SRQ and the Crossbar switch. Apart from these external components, the core consists of 3 integer and 3 floating point units along with a load/store unit that executes any load or store microinstructions sent to the core [9]. Direct Connect Architecture can improve overall system performance and efficiency by eliminating traditional bottlenecks inherent in legacy architectures. Legacy front-side buses restrict and interrupt the flow of data. Slower data flow means slower system performance. Interrupted data flow means reduced system scalability. With Direct Connect Architecture, there are no front-side buses. Instead, the processors, memory controller, and I/O are directly connected to the CPU and communicate at CPU speed [10].

2.2. Intel Xeon Memory Architecture

The Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor is a 64-bit processor that uses two physical Intel NetBurst microarchitecture cores in one chip [4]. The Intel Xeon dual core processor uses a different memory access technique, by including a Front-Side-Bus (FSB) to the SDRAM and a shared L3 cache instead of having only on-chip caches like the AMD Opteron. The L3 cache and the two cores of the processor are connected to the FSB via the Caching Bus Controller. This controller controls all the accesses to the L3 cache and the SDRAM. Figure 2 below provides an overview of the Intel Dual core Xeon and illustrates the main connections in the processor [5].

Figure 2
figure 2

Block diagram of the dual-core Intel Xeon.

Since the L3 cache is shared, each core is able to access almost all of the cache and thus has access to a larger amount of cache memory. The shared L3 cache provides a better efficiency over a split cache since each core can now use more than half of the total cache. It also avoids the coherency traffic between cache in a split approach [11].

3. VisualSim Simulation Environment

At the heart of the simulation environment is the VisualSim Architect tool. It is a graphical modeling tool that allows the design and analysis of "digital, embedded, software, imaging, protocols, analog, control-systems, and DSP designs". It has features that allow quick debugging with a GUI and a software library that includes various tools to track the inputs/stimuli and enable a graphical and textual view of the results. It is based on a library of parameterized components including processors, memory controllers, DMA, buses, switches, and I/O's. The blocks included in the library reduce the time spent on designing the minute details of a system and instead provide a user friendly interface where these details can be altered by just changing their values and not the connections. Using this library of building blocks, a designer can for example, construct a specification level model of a system containing multiple processors, memories, sensors, and buses [12].

In VisualSim, a platform model consists of behavior, or pure functionality, mapped to architectural elements of the platform model. A block diagram of a platform model is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3
figure 3

Block diagram of a platform model.

Once a model is constructed, various scenarios can be explored using simulation. Parameters such as inputs, data rates, memory hierarchies, and speed can be varied and by analyzing simulation results engineers can study the various trade-offs until they reach an optimal solution or an optimized design.

The key advantage of the platform model is that the behavior algorithms may be upgraded without affecting the architecture they execute on. In addition, the architecture could be changed to a completely different processor to see the effect on the user's algorithm, simply by changing the mapping of behavior to architecture. The mapping is just a field name (string) in a data structure transiting the model.

Models of computation in VisualSim support block-oriented design. Components called blocks execute and communicate with other blocks in a model. Each block has a well-defined interface. This interface abstracts the internal state and behavior of a block and restricts how a block interacts with its environment. Central to this block-oriented design are the communication channels that pass data from one port to another according to some messaging scheme. The use of channels to mediate communication implies that blocks interact only with the channels they are connected to and not directly with other blocks.

In VisualSim, the simulation flow can be explained as follows: the simulator translates the graphical depiction of the system into a form suitable for simulation execution and executes simulation of the system model, using user specified model parameters for simulation iteration. During simulation, source modules (such as traffic generators) generate data structures. The data structures flow along to various other processing blocks, which may alter the contents of Data Structures and/or modify their path through the block diagram. In VisualSim simulation continues until there are no more data structures in the system or the simulation clock reaches a specified stop time [7]. During a simulation run, VisualSim collects performance data at any point in the model using a variety of prebuilt probes to compute a variety of statistics on performance measures.

This project uses the VisualSim (VS) Architect tool, to carry out all the simulations and run the benchmarks on the modeled architectures. The work presented here utilizes the hardware architecture library of VS that includes the processor cores, which can be configured as per our requirements, as well as bus ports, controllers, and memory blocks.

3.1. Models' Construction (Systems' Setup)

The platform models for the two processors are constructed within the VS environment using the parameters specified in Table 1.

Table 1 Simulation models parameters.

3.1.1. The Opteron Model

The basic architecture of the simulated AMD dual core Opteron contains two cores with three integer execution units, three floating point units and two loads/stores, and branch units to the data cache [2]. Moreover, the cores contain 2 cache levels with 64 kB of L1 data cache, 64 kB of L1 instruction cache, and 1 MB of L2 cache.

The constructed platform model for the AMD Opteron is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4
figure 4

Platform model for the DirectConnect Architecture.

In the above model, the two large blocks numbered 4 and 5, respectively, are the Processor cores connected via bus ports (blocks 6) to the System Request Queue (block 7), and then to the Crossbar switch (block 8). The Crossbar switch connects the cores to the RAM (block 9) and is programmed to route the incoming data structure to the specified destination and then send the reply back to the requesting core.

On the left block 2 components contain the input task to the two cores. These blocks define software tasks (benchmarks represented as a certain mix of floating point, integer and load/store instructions) that are input to both the processors (Opteron and Xeon) in order to test their memory hierarchy performance. The following subsections give a detailed description of each of the blocks, their functionalities, and any simplifying assumptions made to model the memory architecture.

Architecture Setup

The architecture setup block configures the complete set of blocks linked to a single Architecture_Name parameter found in most blocks. The architecture setup block of the model (block 1) contains the details of the connections between the fields mappings of the Data Structure attributes as well as the routing table that contains any of the virtual connections not wired in the model. The architecture setup also keeps track of all the units that are a part of the model and its name has to be entered into each block that is a part of the model.

Core and Cache

Each core of Opteron implemented in the project using VS is configured to a frequency of 2 GHz and has 128 kB of L1 cache (64 kB data and 64 kB instruction cache), 2 MB of L2 cache, and the floating point, integer, and load/store execution units. This 2 MB of L2 cache per core is compatible with the 4 MB of shared cache used in the Intel Xeon memory architecture. The instruction queue length is set to 6 and instructions are included in the instruction set of both the cores, so as to make the memory access comparison void of all other differences in the architectures. These instructions are defined in the instruction block that is further described in a later section.

Certain simplifications have been made to the core of the Opteron in order to focus the analysis entirely on the memory architecture of the processor. These assumptions include the change of the variable length instructions to fixed length micro-ops [9]. Another assumption made is that any L1 cache miss does not result in a simultaneous request being sent to the L2 cache and the RAM. Instead the requests are sent sequentially, where an L1 cache miss results in an L2 cache access and finally an L2 cache miss results in a DRAM access.

Pipeline

The pipeline of the modeled Opteron consists of four stages, mainly the prefetch, decode, execute, and the store. The prefetch of each instruction begins from the L1 cache and ends in a DRAM access in case of L1 and L2 cache misses. The second stage in the pipeline is the decode stage that is implemented by introducing a delay into the entire process. The decode stage does not actually decode the instruction; instead the time required to decode the instruction is added to the time comprising of the delays from the prefetch stage to the end of the execution stage. The third stage, the execution stage, takes place in the five execution units that are present in the cores, and finally after the execution, the write-back stage writes back the specified data to the memory, mainly the L1 cache. The Pipeline_Stages (text box in Figure 5) shows the four pipeline stages that have been defined for both cores. It also contains the configuration of one of the cores of the Opteron along with the number of execution units and the instruction queue length. The lower text window depicts the details and actions of the pipeline stages.

Figure 5
figure 5

Opteron processor core and pipeline configurations.

Crossbar Switch and the SRQ Blocks

The Crossbar switch configured in the simulation model, is used to route the data packets to the destination specified by the "A_Destination" field of the data structure entering the switch. The main memory is connected to the Crossbar switch via the System Request Queue (SRQ) block both of which are implemented using the virtual machine scripting language available in the VisualSim environment. The SRQ accepts only 8 requests in the queue and does not entertain any further requests until there is an empty space in the queue. Each core and the SDRAM are connected to individual SRQ blocks that are in turn connected to the crossbar switch. Figure 6 shows the crossbar switch as the NBC_Switch and the SRQ blocks as the RIO_IO_Nodes which are linked to the bus ports connected to the SDRAM and the processor cores. Figure 4 provides a general overview of the crossbar switch and the SRQ nodes in context of the entire model.

Figure 6
figure 6

Crossbar switch and SRQ blocks in VisualSim.

Main Memory and the Memory Controller

In the simulation model, the RAM has a capacity of 1 GB and has an in-built memory controller configured to run at a speed of 1638.4 MHz. At this speed and a block width of 4 bytes, the transfer of data from the memory to the cache takes place at a speed of 6.4 GB/s. This rate is commonly used in most of the AMD Opteron processors but can be different depending on the model of the processor. The same rate is also used in the model of the Xeon processor. Each instruction that the RAM executes is translated into delay specified internally by the memory configurations. These configurations are seen in Figure 7 in the Access_Time field as the number of clock cycles spent on the corresponding task.

The SDRAM connects to the cores via the SRQ blocks and the Crossbar switch which routes the SDRAM requests from both the cores to the main memory block and then sends a response back to the requesting core, in terms of a text reply. This process requires a certain delay that depends on the type of instruction sent to the SDRAM. In case the SRQ block queue is empty, a single DRAM response time depends on whether the instruction is a memory read, write, read/write, or erase instruction. Each of these instructions takes a fixed number of clock cycles to complete and is determined in the SDRAM configuration as determined by the Access_Time field seen in Figure 7. To separate the SDRAM access time from the cache access time, a simplification is made such that the SDRAM access request from the core is not sent in parallel to an L2 cache request as in the actual Opteron; instead, the SDRAM request is issued only after an L2 miss has been encountered.

Figure 7
figure 7

SDRAM and memory controller configurations.

Figure 8
figure 8

Shared Bus Architecture.

3.1.2. Xeon Model

Basic Architecture

The basic architecture of the Intel Dual Core Xeon is illustrated in Figure 2. The corresponding platform model is depicted in Figure 8. The two cores of the processor are connected to the shared L2 cache and then via the Front-Side-Bus (FSB) interface to the SDRAM. The modeled Intel Xeon processor consists of two cores with three integer execution units, three floating point units, and two loads/stores and branch units to the data cache. The same specifications used to model the Opteron cores in VisualSim are used here as well. Besides, each core is configured with 64 kB of L1 data cache, 64 kB of L1 instruction cache, whereas the L2 cache is a unified cache and is 4 MB in size. The FSB interface, as seen in Figure 8, was constructed using the Virtual Machine block in VS [7] and is connected to the internal bus which links the two cores to the RAM via the FSB. The software generation block (block 2 on the left side of the model) contains the same tasks as the Opteron.

Architecture Setup

The architecture setup block of the model of the Xeon (Figure 8—block 1) is the same as the one implemented in the Opteron and the field mappings of the Data Structure attributes are copied from the Opteron model to ensure that no factors other than the memory architecture affects the results.

Core and Cache

The core implementation of the Xeon is configured using VS to operate at a frequency of 2 GHz and has 128 kB of L1 cache (64 kB data and 64 kB instruction cache), 4 MB of unified and shared L2 cache [5], floating point, integer, and load/store execution units. Here as well, the instruction queue length is set to 6 and instructions are included in the instruction set of both the cores, so as to make the memory access comparison void of all other differences in the architectures. These instructions are defined in the instruction block that is described in a later section.

Certain simplifications have been made to the core of the Xeon in order to focus the analysis entirely to the memory architecture of the processor. The assumption made in accessing the memory is that any L1 cache miss does not result in a simultaneous request being sent to the L2 cache and the RAM. Instead the requests are sent sequentially, where an L1 cache miss results in an L2 cache access and finally an L2 cache miss results in a RAM access.

To simplify the model and the memory access technique, the process of snooping is not implemented in this simulation, and similar to the Opteron, no parallel requests are sent to two memories.

Pipeline

The pipeline of the modeled Xeon consists of four stages (similar to the Opteron model), the prefetch, decode, execute, and the store. The prefetch of each instruction begins from the L1 cache and ends in a RAM access in case of L1 and L2 cache misses. The second stage in the pipeline is the decode stage that is mainly translated into a wait stage. The third stage, the execution stage, takes place in the five execution units that are present in the cores, and finally after the execution, the write-back stage writes back the specified data to the memory, mainly the L1 cache.

Caching Bridge Controller (CBC)

The CBC, block 7 of the model is simply a bridge that connects the L2 shared cache to the FSB [13]. This FSB then continues the link to the RAM (block 9) from which accesses are made and the data/instruction read is sent to the core that requested the data. The CBC model is developed using the VisualSim scripting language and simulates the exact functionality of a typical controller.

Main Memory and the Memory Controller

The dual-core Xeon contains a main memory of type RAMBUS with a speed similar to the memory connected to the Opteron. The size of the RAM is 1 GB and contains a built-in memory controller. This memory controller is configured to run at a speed of 1638.4 MHz. At this speed and a block width of 4 bytes, the transfer of data from the memory to the cache takes place at a speed of 6.4 GB/s. Each instruction that the RAMBUS will carry out implies a certain delay which has been specified internally in the memory configurations. These configurations are seen in Figure 9 in the Access_Time field as the number of clock cycles spent executing the corresponding task. The RAM connects to the cores via the CBC and data or instruction requests to the RAM from either core are sent to the main memory block via the FSB. The RAM then sends a response back to the requesting core which can be seen as a text reply on the displays that show the flow of requests and replies. DRAM Access Time is the time taken since a request is made and when the data is made available from the DRAM. It is defined in nanoseconds by the user for each operation like Read, Write, or a Read-Write as an access time parameter in the Access_Time field of Figure 9.

Figure 9
figure 9

Main memory and controller configurations of the Intel Xeon.

4. Results and Analysis

Following a series of experimental tests and numerical measurements using benchmarking software, published literature [14–16] discusses the performance of the AMD Opteron when compared to the Xeon processor using physical test beds comprised of the two processors. These three references provide the reader with a very informative and detailed comparison of the two processors when subjected to various testing scenarios using representative loads.

In this work, we are trying to make the case for an approach that calls for early performance analysis and architectural exploration (at the system level) before committing to hardware. The memory architectures of the above processors were used as a vehicle. We were tempted to use these architectures by the fact that there were published results that clearly show the benefits of the Opteron memory architecture when compared to the Xeon FSB architecture and this would no doubt provide us with a reference against which we can validate the simulation results obtained using VisualSim.

Additionally, and to the best of our knowledge, we could not identify any published work that discusses the performance of the two memory architectures at the system level using an approach similar to the one facilitated by VisualSim.

Using VisualSim, a model of the system can be constructed in few days. All of the system design aspects can be addressed using validated parametric library components. All of the building blocks, simulation platforms, analysis, and debugging required to construct a system are provided in a single framework.

Synopsys integrated Cossap (dynamic data flow) and SystemC (digital) into System Studio while VisualSim combines SystemC (digital), synchronous data flow (DSP), finite state machine (FSM), and continuous time (analog) domains. Previous system level tools typically supported a single modeling specific domain. Furthermore, relative to prior generations of graphical modeling tools, VisualSim integrates as many as thirty bottom-up components functions into a single system level, easy to use, reusable blocks, or modules.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that results obtained using the VisualSim environment in this work are generally in line with results and conclusions found in the literature [14–16].

In the work reported here, Simulation runs are performed using a Dell GX260 machine with a P4 processor running at 3.06 GHz, and a 1 Gbyte RAM.

For simulation purposes and to test the performance of both architectures, traffic sequences are used to trigger the constructed models. These sequences are defined data structures in VisualSim; a traffic generator emulates application-specific traffic. The Transaction_Source block in Figures 4 and 8 is used to generate tasks that are applied to the processors as input stimuli. These tasks are benchmarks consisting of a varied percentage mix of integer, floating-point, load/store, and branch instructions. The different percentages are inserted into the software generator's Instruction_Mix file and supplied to the processor cores. Thirty three tasks (Table 2) were generated and used to assess the performance of the DirectConnect and the Shared Bus architectures.

Table 2 Benchmark tasks [12].

Table 3 shows the "Task Latencies" and "Cycles/Task" measured for both processors. Since the models were constructed by having similar configurations in almost every aspect except the memory architecture, the values obtained are therefore a reflection of the performance of that architecture. Figure 10 is a graph of the "Latency per Task" results for each configuration. This graph is plotted using the total number of clock cycles that were taken by each task. The instructions contained in each of these tasks are defined in the software_generation block. At the end of the execution, a text file is generated by VisualSim that contains the number of cycles that were taken by each of the task, including the stall time and the delays caused by the components linking the RAM to the cores.

Table 3 Task latencies and Cycles/Task.
Figure 10
figure 10

Latency per Task (Cycles per Task).

Cleary, the Xeon has exhibited a higher latency in almost every task. These numbers show that the time taken to execute the same task in the Xeon were more than the Opteron.

Figure 11
figure 11

Processor Stall Times (Opteron).

Figure 12
figure 12

Processor Stall Times (Xeon).

Figures 11 and 12 show a graph of processors' stall times. In both cases, 20 samples are taken during the entire simulation period and the data collected is used in the depicted graphs. During the execution of all the tasks, the maximum time for which the processors stalled was different for each kind of architecture. The maximum stall time for the DirectConnect architecture was 2.3 microseconds whereas for the Shared Bus architecture the maximum stall time was 2.9 microseconds. Due to the shared bus in the Xeon's architecture, delays were greater than the DirectConnect approach of the Opteron, and thus the difference in the stall time.

As the models described earlier suggest, the Opteron follows the split cache approach where each core in the processor has its own L1 and L2 cache; thus no part of the cache is shared between the two cores. On the contrary, the Xeon processor employs the shared cached technique and thus both the cores have access to a larger amount of cache than the ones in the Opteron. Whenever one of the cores in the Xeon is not accessing the shared cache, the other core has complete access to the entire cache which results in a higher hit ratio.

Table 4 shows the hit-ratios of both the architecture models. As the values suggest, the hit-ratios of the Xeon/Shared cache are higher than those of the Opteron/split cache, the reason being discussed above. It is worth mentioning that few simplifying assumptions were made to the memory architectures operation of both processors as discussed in Section 3.

Table 4 Hit ratios.

5. Conclusions

In this work, we utilized a system modeling methodology above the detailed chip implementation level that allows one to explore different designs without having to write Verilog, VHDL, SystemC, or simply C/C++ code. This approach contributes to a considerable saving in time and allows for the exploration and assessment of different designs prior to implementation.

Since predictability of performance is critical in microprocessors design, simulation models can be used to evaluate architectural alternatives and assist in making informed decisions. Simulation is an acceptable performance modeling technique that can be used to evaluate architectural alternatives and features. In this work, we used Virtual System Prototyping and simulation to investigate the performance of the memory subsystems of both, the Opeteron, and the Xeon dual core processors.

Simulation results indicate that the Opteron has exhibited better latency than the Xeon for the majority of the tasks. In all cases, it either outperformed the Xeon or at least had similar latency. This demonstrates that using an FSB as the only means of communication between cores and memory has resulted in an increase in stalls and latency. On the other hand, in the DirectConnect Architecture, the cores being directly connected to the RAM, via the crossbar switch and the SRQ which were running at processor speed, had minimal delays. Each RAM request from either of the cores was sent individually to the SRQ blocks and they were routed to the RAM that had its memory controller on-chip and the cores did not have to compete for a shared resource.

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Correspondence to Assim Sagahyroon.

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Muhammad, H.S., Sagahyroon, A. Virtual Prototyping and Performance Analysis of Two Memory Architectures. J Embedded Systems 2009, 984891 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1155/2009/984891

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