ABSTRACT
Co-analysis is a task that, starting from system-level specification, provides quantitative information useful to make system-level decisions such as architectural selection and partitioning. The core of this task involves the identification and evaluation of functional and structural properties of the specification, which could affect the design performance on different architectural platforms. This chapter presents a characterization of the main processing elements architectural features, and presents the proposed model and the methodology developed based on such a characterization. It describes the validation process showing the experimental results obtained by applying the presented methodology to a meaningful test suite. General Purpose Processors (GPPs) are designed to be useful in several contexts and so it is difficult to detect particular architectural features that strongly identify a GPP-suitable application.
