An Investigation of the Performance of Various Instruction-Issue Buffer Topologies

Stephan Jourdan, Pascal Sainrat, Daniel Litaize

Abstract

In out-of-order issue superscalar microprocessors, instructions must be buffered before their issuing. This buffer can be either unified (one buffer linked to all units), distributed among the units as in the PowerPC620, or semi-unified (a few buffers each shared by several units) as in the MIPS R10000. Of course, the size of this buffer also plays a leading role in the performance of the processor. Intensive trac-driven simulations on the SPEC92 suite have been made in order to determine the best designs and cost-effective choices are pointed out according to the degree of the processor.

Keywords

Instruction-Level Parallelism, Superscalar Architecture, Out-of-Order and Speculative Execution, and Instruction-Issue Buffer.

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