New Trends in Processor Architecture

RELATORE: Prof. ANTONIO GONZALEZ, Deparment of Computer Architecture, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya - Barcelona (Spain)

DATA: 8 Marzo 2002

LUOGO: Dipartimento di Ingegneria della Informazione

SOMMARIO

Current superscalar organizations are approaching a point of diminishing returns. Some of the main hurdles for the scalability of such organizations are their increasing complexity, the limited parallelism of some applications, the increasing memory to processor gap, and some problems related to deep sub-micron technologies such as power consumption, power density, soft errors and wire delays.

This seminar will initially describe the state-of-the-art in the design of superscalar processors and examine the main limitations outlined above. Then, it will focus on some of the main research directions on future microarchitectures and code generation techniques to address these limitations. In particular, this seminar will describe current research efforts in the areas of clustered microarchitectures, speculative multithreaded processors and power-aware microarchitectures. Other more traditional but still critical research areas such as the design of the memory hierarchy, data speculation techniques, and tools for program analysis and optimization will also be studied. Special emphasis will be made on some of the recent/ongoing research activities in our main research project, which focuses on the design of clustered, power-aware, speculative multithreaded microarchitectures.