Microarchitectural innovations: Boosting microprocessor performance beyond semiconductor technology scaling

Andreas Moshovos

doi:10.1109/5.964438

Microarchitectural innovations: Boosting microprocessor performance beyond semiconductor technology scaling

2001-01-01

26

OA

AI

DOI：10.1109/5.964438

Original request for help

Save

Abstract

En 中文

Semiconductor technology scaling provides faster and more plentiful transistors to build microprocessors, and applications continue to drive the demand for more powerful microprocessors. Weaving the raw semiconductor material into a microprocessor that offers the performance needed by modern and future applications is the role of computer architecture. This paper overviews some of the microarchitectural techniques that empower modern high-performance microprocessors. The techniques are classified into: 1) techniques meant to increase the concurrency in instruction processing, while maintaining the appearance of sequential processing and 2) techniques that exploit program behavior The first category includes pipelining, superscalar execution, out-of-order execution, register renaming, and techniques to overlap memory-accessing instructions. The second category includes memory hierarchies, branch predictors, trace caches, and memory-dependence predictors. The paper also discusses microarchitectural techniques likely, to be used in future microprocessors, including data value speculation and instruction reuse, microarchitectures with multiple sequencers and thread-level speculation, and microarchitectural techniques for tackling the problems of power consumption and reliability.

Keywords:

branch prediction

high performance microprocessors

memory dependence speculation

microarchitecture

out-of-order execution

speculative execution

thread-level speculation

Microarchitectural innovations: Boosting microprocessor performance beyond semiconductor technology scaling

Abstract

Journal

Organization