Multiscalar processors
- 1 May 1995
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
- Vol. 23 (2) , 414-425
- https://doi.org/10.1145/225830.224451
Abstract
Multiscalar processors use a new, aggressive implementation paradigm for extracting large quantities of instruction level parallelism from ordinary high level language programs. A single program is divided into a collection of tasks by a combination of software and hardware. The tasks are distributed to a number of parallel processing units which reside within a processor complex. Each of these units fetches and executes instructions belonging to its assigned task. The appearance of a single logical register file is maintained with a copy in each parallel processing unit. Register results are dynamically routed among the many parallel processing units with the help of compiler-generated masks. Memory accesses may occur speculatively without knowledge of preceding loads or stores. Addresses are disambiguated dynamically, many in parallel, and processing waits only for true data dependences.This paper presents the philosophy of the multiscalar paradigm, the structure of multiscalar programs, and the hardware architecture of a multiscalar processor. The paper also discusses performance issues in the multiscalar model, and compares the multiscalar paradigm with other paradigms. Experimental results evaluating the performance of a sample of multiscalar organizations are also presented.Keywords
This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
- ARB: a hardware mechanism for dynamic reordering of memory referencesIEEE Transactions on Computers, 1996
- The anatomy of the register file in a multiscalar processorPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1994
- A comparison of dynamic branch predictors that use two levels of branch historyPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1993
- The expandable split window paradigm for exploiting fine-grain parallelsimPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1992
- The impact of synchronization and granularity on parallel systemsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1990
- Look-Ahead ProcessorsACM Computing Surveys, 1975