MIPS® MT ASE

Multithreading, or the concurrent presence of multiple active threads on the same CPU, is a technique for tolerating memory and execution latency and getting higher utilization out of processor functional units. This technique popularized by Intel is also known as Hyper-Threading. A processor pipeline can achieve 80-90% utilization by switching threads during data-dependent stalls or cache misses. The MIPS MT ASE provides a framework for multithreading the MIPS architecture.

Virtual processing elements (VPE) enable virtual processors (two on 34K™, 4 or more on the 1004K™) to share common resources
Fine grain threading enables applications using MIPS MT ASE instructions to exploit inherent application parallelism
Quality of service (QoS) scheduling allows one or more real-time threads of execution to a defined portion of the total compute power
Threads are relocatable in multi-core systems
Applications and OSs see a "virtual" thread resource pool, since thread context is software visible
Immediate system performance boost of 20-40% with little or no code changes