Multimedia components for the visualization of dynamic behavior in computer architectures
Peter Marwedel, Birgit Sirocic · 2003
Understanding modern processors requires a good knowledge of the dynamic behavior of processors. Traditional media like books use text for describing the dynamic behavior of processors. Visualization of this behavior, however, is impossible, due to the static nature of books. In this paper, we describe multimedia components for visualizing the dynamic behavior of hardware structures, called RaVi (abbreviation for the German equivalent of "computer architecture visualization"). Available RaVi components1 include models of a microcoded MIPS architecture, of a MIPS pipeline, of scoreboarding, Tomasulo's algorithm and the MESI multiprocessor cache protocol.