Processing system including a reconfigurable channel infrastructure comprising a control chain with combination elements for each processing element and a programmable switch between each pair of neighboring processing elements for efficient clustering of processing elements

摘要

A processing system according to the invention comprises a plurality of processing elements (PE1, . . . , PE7). The processing elements comprise a controller and computation means. The plurality of processing elements is dynamically reconfigurable as mutually independently operating task units (TU1, TU2, TU3), which task units comprise one processing element (PE7) or a cluster of two or more processing elements (PE3, PE4, PE5, PE6). The processing elements within a cluster are arranged to execute instructions under a common thread of program control. In this way the processing system is capable of using the same sub-set of data-path elements to exploit instruction level parallelism or task level parallelism or a combination thereof, dependent on the application.