The term Computer Architecture was first defined in the paper by Amdahl, Blaauw and Brooks of IBM Corporation announcing IBM System/360 computer family on April 7, 1964. On that day IBM Corporation introduced, in the words of IBM spokesman, "the most important product announcement that this corporation has made in its history". There were six models introduced originally, ranging in performance...

IONS AND METHODOLOGY Computer architecture’s heavy emphasis on simulation effectively discourages the research community from exploring other useful and possibly more informative modeling techniques. The few published papers using and proposing analytic models have not stimulated significant follow-up efforts. Stories abound of such papers receiving knee-jerk negative rejections from program co...

Today’s general-purpose processors are optimized for maximum throughput. Real-time systems need a processor with both a reasonable and a known worst-case execution time (WCET). Features such as pipelines with instruction dependencies, caches, branch prediction, and out-of-order execution complicate WCET analysis and lead to very conservative estimates. In this paper, we evaluate the issues of c...

In the past, efforts were taken to improve the performance of a processor via frequency scaling. However, industry has reached the limits of increasing the frequency and therefore concurrent execution of instructions on multiple cores seems the only possible option. It is not enough to provide concurrent execution by the hardware, software also have to introduce concurrency in order to exploit ...

There seems to be little consensus on what an agent architecture is. In this paper I will talk about architectures in computer design, and programming languages, and what their distinctions are. I will then discuss agent architectures relative to that distinction. Finally, I will discuss recent work I have done on building better computer architectures for agency. One of the problems with writi...

Traditionally, IEEE Micro has devoted special issues to topics such as hot chips, buses, interconnection technology, DSP, and memory systems. This issue is different because it focuses on computer architecture education in universities and colleges. In the past two decades we’ve seen immense strides in this field. If the next generation of computer scientists and engineers are to build on these...

Increased transistor integration will soon allow us to build processor chips with over 1,000 cores. To construct such a chip, energy and power consumption are the most formidable obstacles. Hence, we need to design it from the ground up for energy efficiency. First of all, we want to operate at low voltage, since this is the point of maximum energy efficiency. In such an environment, however, w...