Disadvantages

• No acceleration for variable length decoding

  • 50% of computation for MPEG-2 decoding on C6x in C

• Deep pipeline

  • If a branch is in the pipeline, interrupts are disabled: avoid branches by using conditional execution
  • No hardware protection against pipeline hazards: programmer and software tools must guard against it

• No hardware looping or bit-reversed addressing

  • Must emulate in software

• 40-bit accumulation incurs performance penalty

• No status register: must emulate status bits other than saturation bit (.L unit)

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