The design and analysis of a high performance single chip processor
In this thesis a number of architectural and implementational options available to the designer of a single chip processor are evaluated both by analyzing a single chip processor designed -and implemented at the University of Wisconsin (the PIPE processor), and by evaluating the results of simulation runs of a set of benchmark programs on the PIPE simulator. One architectural option that is shown to have tremendous potential is the incorporation of I/O queues. They reduce the impact of slow memory on processor performance, allow the instruction fetch logic to take precedence at the processor/memory interface, and their existence even has an affect on the optimum design of the functional units of a single chip processor. From an implementation perspective they are relatively simple to build, do not make a single chip processor unduly difficult to interrupt, and reduce the overall complexity of the issue logic. This work also shows that most current single chip processors perform insufficient amounts of instruction prefetching, and that by employing the combination of an instruction queue and an instruction queue buffer, the performance of an on-chip instruction cache can be significantly improved. This is especially noticeable for smaller cache sizes, where the IQ/IQB combination can make a small cache perform as well as a cache four to eight times larger that uses a prefetch scheme that is less aggressive (but that has been shown to outperform the prefetching schemes used by existing SCPs). By making a small cache perform as well as a much larger cache, valuable on-chip real estate is made available for other functions.
- Research Organization:
- Wisconsin Univ., Madison, WI (USA)
- OSTI ID:
- 5897698
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
990200* -- Mathematics & Computers
ALGORITHMS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
COMPUTERS
DESIGN
DIGITAL COMPUTERS
ECONOMIC ANALYSIS
ECONOMICS
INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
MEMORY DEVICES
OPTIMIZATION
PERFORMANCE TESTING
SEMICONDUCTOR DEVICES
SEMICONDUCTOR STORAGE DEVICES
TESTING