A Tour Of The Pentium Pro Processor Microarchitecture

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

12-stage, superpipelined implementation, trading
less work per pipestage for more stages. The Pentium Pro processor reduced its
pipestage time by 33 percent, compared with a Pentium processor, which means the
Pentium Pro processor can have a 33% higher clock speed than a Pentium processor
and still be equally easy to produce from a semiconductor manufacturing process
(i.e., transistor speed) perspective.

The Pentium processor's superscalar microarchitecture, with its ability to
execute two instructions per clock, would be difficult to exceed without a new
approach. The new approach used by the Pentium Pro processor removes the
constraint of linear instruction sequencing between the traditional "fetch" and
"execute" phases, and opens up a wide instruction window using an instruction
pool. This approach allows the "execute" phase of the Pentium Pro processor to
have much more visibility into the program's instruction stream so that better
scheduling may take place. It requires ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

by 60 percent. This increasing memory
latency, relative to the CPU core speed, is a fundamental problem that the
Pentium Pro processor set out to solve. One approach would be to place the
burden of this problem onto the chipset but a high-performance CPU that needs
very high speed, specialized, support components is not a good solution for a
volume production system.

A brute-force approach to this problem is, of course, increasing the size of the
L2 cache to reduce the miss ratio. While effective, this is another expensive
solution, especially considering the speed requirements of today's L2 cache SRAM
components. Instead, the Pentium Pro processor is designed from an ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: