Microarchitectural Innovations: Boosting Microprocessor Performance Beyond Semiconductor Technology Scaling

Semiconductor technology scaling provides faster and more plentiful transistors to build microprocessors, and applications continue to drive the demand for more powerful microprocessors. Weaving the “raw” semiconductor material into a microprocessor that offers the performance needed by modern and future applications is the role of computer architecture. This paper overviews some of the microarchitectural techniques that empower modern high-performance microprocessors. The techniques are classified into: 1) techniques meant to increase the concurrency in instruction processing, while maintaining the appearance of sequential processing and 2) techniques that exploit program behavior. The first category includes pipelining, superscalar execution, out-of-order execution, register renaming, and techniques to overlap memory-accessing instructions. The second category includes memory hierarchies, branch predictors, trace caches, and memory-dependence predictors. The paper also discusses microarchitectural techniques likely to be used in future microprocessors, including data value speculation and instruction reuse, microarchitectures with multiple sequencers and thread-level speculation, and microarchitectural techniques for tackling the problems of power consumption and reliability.