A Study on the Loop Behavior of Embedded Programs

Abstract

Software executing on a microprocessor contributes to much of the overall power and performance of an embedded system. A general rule-of-thumb for the behavior of both desktop and embedded systems has been that most execution time is spent in a small fraction of the software. We studied the behavior of 16 embedded system programs from the Powerstone benchmarks, with a focus specifically on those programs ’ loop behavior. We examined such behavior for a popular 32-bit embedded microprocessor (MIPS) as well as a popular 8-bit mmicroprocessor (8051).