Is your memory hierarchy stopping your microprocessor from performing at the high level it should be? Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk shows you how to resolve this problem. The book tells you everything you need to know about the logical design and operation, physical design and operation, performance characteristics and resulting design trade-offs, and the energy consumption of modern memory hierarchies. You learn how to to tackle the challenging optimization problems that result from the side-effects that can appear at any point in the entire hierarchy.As a result you will be able to design and emulate the entire memory hierarchy. . Understand all levels of the system hierarchy -Xcache, DRAM, and disk. . Evaluate the system-level effects of all design choices. . Model performance and energy consumption for each component in the memory hierarchy.

Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk

A high-performance, superscalar-based computer system with out-of-order instruction execution for enhanced resource utilization and performance throughput. The computer system fetches a plurality of fixed length instructions with a specified, sequential program order (in-order). The computer system includes an instruction execution unit including a register file, a plurality of functional units, and an instruction control unit for examining the instructions and scheduling the instructions for out-of-order execution by the functional units. The register file includes a set of temporary data registers that are utilized by the instruction execution control unit to receive data results generated by the functional units. The data results of each executed instruction are stored in the temporary data registers until all prior instructions have been executed, thereby retiring the executed instruction in-order.

High performance, superscalar-based computer system with out-of-order instruction execution

To increase the performance of a pipelined processor executing instructions, conditional instruction execution issues and executes instructions, including but not limited to branches, before the controlling conditions may be available and makes the decision to update the destination as late as possible in the pipeline Conditional instruction execution is further improved by a condition code mask field in instructions to choose those condition code bits to be involved in the decision; by a set condition code flag to enable or disable the setting of a condition code; by stale condition code handling to determine if the logically previous conditionally executing instruction was successful or unsuccessful in setting the condition code and to conditionally execute accordingly; by multiple condition codes so that independent instruction sequences can use condition codes in parallel; and by condition code reservation stations to capture a needed condition code as soon as it becomes available and hold that captured value until needed, thus freeing the condition code as soon as possible for use by other instructions Moving the conditional decision from the point of instruction issue to the point of instruction completion permits branch instructions to be eliminated in many cases; permits conditionally executing instructions directly in line; permits filling the branch umbra following a delayed branch with conditionally executing instructions; and reduces the latency from condition code generation to condition code use

Computer processor with an efficient means of executing many instructions simultaneously

The problems of data dependency resolution and precise interrupt implementation in pipelined processors are combined. A design for a hardware mechanism that resolves dependencies dynamically and, at the same time, guarantees precise interrupts is presented. Simulation studies show that by resolving dependencies the proposed mechanism is able to obtain a significant speedup over a simple instruction issue mechanism as well as implement precise interrupts. >

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Instruction issue logic for high-performance, interruptible, multiple functional unit, pipelined computers

High speed scalar processing is an essential characteristic of high performance general purpose computer systems. Highly concurrent execution of scalar code is difficult due to data dependencies and conditional branches. This paper proposes an architectural concept called guarded instructions to reduce the penalty of conditional branches in deeply pipelined processors. A code generation heuristic, the decision tree scheduling technique, reorders instructions in a complex of basic blocks so as to make efficient use of guarded instructions. Performance evaluation of several benchmarks are presented, including a module from the UNIX kernel. Even with these difficult scalar code examples, a speedup of two is achievable by using conventional pipelined uniprocessors augmented by guard instructions, and a speedup of three or more can be achieved using processors with parallel instruction pipelines.

Highly concurrent scalar processing

Basic principles and design tradeoffs for control of pipelined processors are first discussed. We concentrate on register-register architectures like the CRAY-1 where pipeline control logic is localized to one or two pipeline stages and is referred to as "instruction issue logic." Design tradeoffs are explored by giving designs for a variety of instruction issue methods that represent a range of complexity and sophistication. These vary from the CRAY-1 issue logic to a version of Tomasulo's algorithm, first used in the IBM 360/91 floating point unit. Also studied are Thornton's "scoreboard" algorithm used on the CDC 6600 and an algorithm we have devised. To provide a standard for comparison, all the issue methods are used to implement the CRAY-1 scalar architecture. Then, using a simulation model and the Lawrence Livermore Loops compiled with the CRAY Fortran compiler, performance results for the various issue methods are given and discussed.

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Weiss

Papers

Instruction Issue Logic in Pipelined Supercomputers