Multiple-banked register file architectures

The register file access time is one of the critical delays in current superscalar processors. Its impact on processor performance is likely to increase in future processor generations, as they are expected to increase the issue width (which implies more register ports) and the size of the instruction window (which implies more registers), and to use some kind of multithreading. Under this scenario, the register file access time could be a dominant delay and a pipelined implementation would be desirable to allow for high clock rates. However, a multi-stage register file has severe implications for processor performance (e.g. higher branch misprediction penalty) and complexity (more levels of bypass logic). To tackle these two problems, in this paper we propose a register file architecture composed of multiple banks. In particular we focus on a multi-level organization of the register file, which provides low latency and simple bypass logic. We propose several caching policies and pref...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: José-Lorenzo Cruz, Antonio González, Mateo Valero, Nigel P. Topham
• Keywords: File Access Time, Hardware, ISCA 2000, Register File, Register File Access