A comparative performance evaluation of various state maintenance mechanisms
Michael J. Butler, Yale N. Patt · 1993
Speculative execution and dynamic scheduling are two promising techniques for achieving high perfor-mance in superscalar processors. These techniques re-quire a mechanism for maintaining all architecturally visible machine state. In this study we examine the performance implications of three common state main-tenance mechanisms: the reorder buffer, the history bufler, and checkpointing. We model the execution of the four integer benchmarks from the SPEC89 suite for a variety of maintenance techniques. We report the results of these measurements and their implica-tions with respect to the design of high performance superscalar processors. 1