The impact of hardware scheduling mechanisms on the performance and cost of processor designs

Hardware schedulers supporting out-of-order execution are widespread nowadays. Nevertheless, studies quantifying the impact of schedulers on the performance and cost of processors are rare. The paper tries to close this gap. It turns out that the hardware schedulers can double the performance at a m...

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书目详细资料
Main Authors: Müller, S, Leister, H, Dell, P, Gerteis, N, Kroening, D
其他作者: Cap, C
格式: Conference item
出版: dblp computer science bibliography 1999
实物特征
总结:Hardware schedulers supporting out-of-order execution are widespread nowadays. Nevertheless, studies quantifying the impact of schedulers on the performance and cost of processors are rare. The paper tries to close this gap. It turns out that the hardware schedulers can double the performance at a moderate increase (10–24%) in a processor’s gate count. Earlier rearranging of instructions allows for better performance, but it does not guarantee it. The lack of features like forwarding and non-blocking resources can nullify this gain. Despite of its out-of-order dispatch capability, the original Scoreboard scheduler, for example, performs significantly worse than a standard in-order pipeline. The paper also identifies the aspects responsible for this poor performance and quantifies their impact. The single most important aspect is the lack of result forwarding.