DRAMs contain a very wide datapath internal to the chip which can deliver orders of magnitude greater memory bandwidth inside the chip than through the pins. The dilemma lies in deciding what to connect to the other end of this wide pipe to memory. We compare two alternatives: microprocessors (including MIMD multiprocessors) and SIMD processors. Microprocessors are better accepted and are suite...

Memory accesses are among the slowest of a CPU’s operations, due to the fact that Moore’s law has increased CPU instruction performance at a much greater rate than it has increased memory performance. This difference in performance increase means that memory operations have been getting increasingly expensive compared to simple register-to-register instructions. Modern CPUs sport increasingly l...

Desktop workloads are expected to shift over the next few years to become increasingly media-centric. These multimedia applications require much larger computational demands than current desktop processors can provide. In this paper, we describe four major requirements that we believe any eeective desktop processor should address: it should meet the performance requirements of desktop workloads...

Hawk is a language for the speci cation of microprocessors at the microarchitectural level. In this paper we use Hawk to specify a modern microarchitecture based on the Intel P6 with features such as speculation, register renaming, and superscalar out-of-order execution. We show that parametric polymorphism, type-classes, higher-order functions, lazy evaluation, and the state monad are key to H...

Virtual memory is a technique for managing the resource of physical memory. It gives an application the illusion of a very large amount of memory, typically much larger than what is actually available. It protects the code and data of user-level applications from the actions of other programs but also allows programs to share portions of their address spaces if desired. It supports the executio...

The increasing need in high energy physics experiments for computation power for both online and offline applications, coupled with the current "microprocessor revolution," has led us to examine the use of microprocessors in various aspects of REP computing. The following article is a brief (and admittedly somewhat biased) review of current hardware products, the costs of developing and produci...

Recent trends in processor power for the next generation devices point clearly to significant increase in processor heat dissipation over the coming years. In the desktop system design space, the tendency has been to minimize system enclosure size while maximizing performance, which in turn leads to high power densities in future generation systems. The current thermal solutions used today cons...