Heterogeneous multi-core processors, such as the IBM Cell processor, can deliver high performance. However, these processors are notoriously difficult to program: different cores support different instruction set architectures, and the processor as a whole does not provide coherence between the different cores’ local memories.\udWe examine Hera-JVM’s performance under a series of real-world Java benchmarks from the SpecJVM, Java Grande and Dacapo benchmark suites. These benchmarks show a wide variation in relative performance on the different core types of the Cell processor, depending upon the nature of their workload. Execution of these benchmarks on Hera-JVM can achieve speedups of up to 2.25x by using one of the Cell processor’s SPE accelerator cores, compared to execution on the main PowerPC-based core. When all six SPE cores are exploited, parallel workloads can achieve speedups of up to 13x compared to execution on the single PowerPC core.
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