Complexity-Effective Superscalar Processors

The performance tradeoff between hardware complexity and clock speed is studied. First, a generic superscalar pipeline is defined. Then the specific areas of register renaming, instruction window wakeup and selection logic, and operand bypassing are analyzed. Each is modeled and Spice simulated for feature sizes of 0:8m, 0:35m, and 0:18m. Performance results and trends are expressed in terms of issue width and window size. Our analysis indicates that window wakeup and selection logic as well as operand bypass logic are likely to be the most critical in the future. A microarchitecture that simplifies wakeup and selection logic is proposed and discussed. This implementation puts chains of dependent instructions into queues, and issues instructions from multiple queues in parallel. Simulation shows little slowdown as compared with a completely flexible issue window when performance is measured in clock cycles. Furthermore, because only instructions at queue heads need to be awaken...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Subbarao Palacharla, Norman P. Jouppi, James E. Smith
• Keywords: Hardware, Instruction Window Wakeup, ISCA 1997, Selection Logic, Window Wakeup