A 533 MHz BiCMOS superscalar microprocessor
E.T. Cohen, Jamie Ballard, J. Blomgren, C.S. Brashears, V. Moldenhauer, J. Pattin · 2002
This 533 MHz BiCMOS microprocessor is the fastest PC microprocessor to comply with the PowerPC* Architecture specification, and to fit on a daughter-card compatible with existing air-cooled, desk-side systems. The speed is achieved by combination of BiCMOS process technology and a microarchitecture with attention to technology capabilities. The three-way superscalar microarchitecture issues one integer or floating-point, one load/store, and one branch instruction in parallel. Two- to three-way superscalar is the architectural "sweet spot": enough hardware parallelism to be effective without requiring complex, out-of-order execution.