A co-designed virtual machine for instruction-level distributed processing
Ho-Seop Kim, James Edward Smith · 2004
A current trend in high-performance superscalar processors is toward simpler designs that attempt to strike a balance between clock frequency, instruction-level parallelism, and power consumption. To achieve this goal, the thesis research reported here advocates a microarchitecture and design paradigm that rely less on low-level speculation techniques and more on simpler, modular designs with distributed processing at the instruction level, i.e., instruction-level distributed processing (ILDP). This thesis shows that designing a hardware/software co-designed virtual machine (VM) system using an accumulator-oriented instruction set architecture (ISA) and microarchitecture is a good approach for implementing complexity-effective, high-performance out-of-order superscalar machines. The following three key points support this conclusion: • An accumulator-oriented instruction format and microarchitecture fit today’s technology constraints better than conventional design approaches: The ILDP ISA format assigns temporary values that account for most of the register communication to a small number of accumulators. As a result, the complexity of the register file and associated hardware