VCOP has dedicated address generators (Agens) that facilitate efficient multidimensional access patterns for loads and stores in the loop. VCOP’s Agens compute address offsets; individual loads and stores supply base addresses from the parameter block which are combined with the offsets to form the effective address for the load or store. There are eight Agens, but a single Agen can be shared among different loads or stores with different base addresses.

The C7x has three different mechanisms for emulating VCOP’s Agens. They are, from most efficient to least efficient: the Streaming Engine (SE), the Streaming Address Generator (SA), and regular indexed addressing.