In this course, you will learn to design the computer architecture of complex modern microprocessors.
Basic Two-way In-order Superscalar
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From the course by Princeton University
Computer Architecture
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From the lesson
Superscalar 1
This lecture covers cache characteristics and basic superscalar architecture.
Meet the Instructors
David WentzlaffAssociate Professor
Electrical Engineering
Let's, let's look at a baseline 2-way in-order superscalar.
That's a mouthful to say. So, difference than the pipelines you've
seen before. We have two ALU's.
It's a big difference. We can execute two integer ops at the same
time in this pipe. Drawn here, we are going to actually
differentiate these two pipes. We are going to call this pipeline A and
this pipeline B, and pipeline A lets say, can do integer ops and branches, and
pipeline B can do integer ops and memory access.
But you can't, you can't do memory up here and you can't do branches down there.
That's, there's nothing fundamental. We're just going to look at it to sort of,
basic example here, we have two asymmetric pipelines.
An important, important point of this, first is that, compared to our 5-stage you
know MIPS processor is that with will it fetch two instructions at the same time.
If we want to actually be able to execute two things, we need to able somehow get
that out of the instruction cache or the instruction memory.
Hm, okay. Well, that's interesting.
So, the program counter kind of sort of go in here and instead of being one
instruction now we actually get two to go in these two different instruction
registers. We also need to add more ports to our
register file. Instead of, in our basic pipeline that we
have talked about earlier, we had only two read ports.
You gave two different addresses and it outputted two registers.
Now, because we have two different instructions at the same time, we actually
have to pull out four different read ports or four different read registers at the
same time. And, if we want to be able to retire or,
commit instructions two at a time, we need to add more write ports.
So I, I show the register file here sort of split into two.
But, the register files kind of, it, it's together, but logically I just drew it
apart so, that you can actually make heads or tails of the drawing.
So that's, that's something interesting to think about is, you have to, to worry
about that. Okay, so the first question I have here,
is this good enough? Is this pipeline diagram good enough in,
let's say, the fetch stage? We stick some addresses in, we get two
instructions out. So, that's a good question.
Do we do PC and PC + four? So, let's say we can, there's some logic
which we pull out PC and PC + four at the same time.
So, we're executing two instructions. So, so roughly, you know, we need to worry
about alignment issues here. We need to worry about branches is, let's
say, the first instruction in, that we pull out of the two instructions.
In this next part here, Our pipes are not symmetric.
So, is this, is this good enough? So, what happens if the first instruction
that comes out here is a load. So, instruction IR0 here.
The instruction register just loaded with the bits from the load.
What, what happens down the stream here? Can the load happen here?
[inaudible]. Yeah.
That's a problem. So, we're starting to go with the
superscalar here. We need to start thinking about having,
let's look back and forth here and take a look at this.
You need something here that can take an instruction that will show up here and
route all the operand values down over here.
Largely, a lot of times people call this issue logic or instruction steering logic.
So, you have to sort of steer the operands and you're going to, you can basically
swap the two operands, the two instructions that are going down the pipe
at the same time. Okay, so, so that's, that's interesting,
and this is, could actually cost some time to do this.
So, this might motivate us to have longer pipelines.
So, we'll talk about that in a second. Another thing you have to do, is on the
control side, is you have to actually start thinking about duplicating control.
So here, we actually have two decoders because we're decoding two instructions at
the same time. So, the instruction register wires up to
Decode A and this instruction register wires up to Decode B and then they're
going to drive singles down across the respective A and B data paths.
So, that's, something not drawn here, is you may also, if you have to interchange
these sort of instruction register zero to the B pipe.
You might have to, you definitely have some, you know, communication or some,
swapping of the instruction inputs here. So that's, that's, that's sort of the
baseline, 2-way processor.
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