Program Balance and Its Impact on High Performance RISC Architectures

Information on the behavior of programs is essential for deciding the number and nature of functional units in high performance architectures. In this paper, we present studies on the balance of access and computation tasks on a typical RISC architecture, the MIPS. The MIPS programs are analyzed to nd the demands they place on the memory system and the oating point or integer computation units. A balance metric that indicates the match of accessing power to computation power is calculated. It is observed that many of the SPEC oating point programs and kernels from supercomputing applications typically considered as computation intensive programs, place extensive demands on the memory system in terms of memory bandwidth. Access related instructions are seen to dominate most instruction streams. We discuss how these instruction stream characteristics can limit the instruction issue in superscalar processors. The properties of the dynamic instruction mix are used to alert computer archit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Lizy Kurian John, Vinod Reddy, Paul T. Hulina, Lee D. Coraor
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCA 1995, Instruction, Instruction Stream, Memory Bandwidth