The shift to multi-core processors presents a number of
opportunities and challenges to different research fields, including
the field of FPGA applications. This paper investigates the
advantages of combining multi-core processors and
reconfigurable instruction set extensions. Both our analysis and
the experimental results show that these two approaches exploit
different levels of parallelism. Using a case study on the Floyd-
Warshall algorithm, we demonstrate that the multi-core
architecture and the reconfigurable instruction set extensions
complement each other. By combining these two methods
together we find a win-win solution, which gives us a more
efficient implementation with higher performance.