RISC vs CISC
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Multiplying Two Numbers in Memory
Although Apple’s Power Macintosh line featured RISC-based chips and Windows NT was RISC compatible, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 were designed with CISC processors in mind. Many companies were unwilling to take a chance with the emerging RISC technology. Without commercial interest, processor developers were unable to manufacture RISC chips in large enough volumes to make their price competitive.Ditulis dalam Uncategorized | Tidak ada komentar »
processor super scalar
Superscalar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Simple superscalar pipeline. By fetching and dispatching two instructions at a time, a maximum of two instructions per cycle can be completed.
Processor board of a CRAY T3e supercomputer with four superscalar Alpha 21164 processors
A superscalar CPU architecture implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. It thereby allows faster CPU throughput than would otherwise be possible at the same clock rate. A superscalar processor executes more than one instruction during a clock cycle by simultaneously dispatching multiple instructions to redundant functional units on the processor. Each functional unit is not a separate CPU core but an execution resource within a single CPU such as an arithmetic logic unit, a bit shifter, or a multiplier.
While a superscalar CPU is typically also pipelined, they are two different performance enhancement techniques. It is theoretically possible to have a non-pipelined superscalar CPU or a pipelined non-superscalar CPU.
The superscalar technique is traditionally associated with several identifying characteristics. Note these are applied within a given CPU core.
- Instructions are issued from a sequential instruction stream
- CPU hardware dynamically checks for data dependencies between instructions at run time (versus software checking at compile time)
- Accepts multiple instructions per clock cycle
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[edit] History
Seymour Cray’s CDC 6600 from 1965 is often mentioned as the first superscalar design. The Intel i960CA (1988) and the AMD 29000-series 29050 (1990) microprocessors were the first commercial single chip superscalar microprocessors. RISC CPUs like these brought the superscalar concept to micro computers because the RISC design results in a simple core, allowing straightforward instruction dispatch and the inclusion of multiple functional units (such as ALUs) on a single CPU in the constrained design rules of the time. This was the reason that RISC designs were faster than CISC designs through the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Except for CPUs used in some battery-powered devices, essentially all general-purpose CPUs developed since about 1998 are superscalar. Beginning with the “P6” (Pentium Pro and Pentium II) implementation, Intel’s x86 architecture microprocessors have implemented a CISC instruction set on a superscalar RISC microarchitecture. Complex instructions are internally translated to a RISC-like “micro-ops” RISC instruction set, allowing the processor to take advantage of the higher-performance underlying processor while remaining compatible with earlier Intel processors.
[edit] From scalar to superscalar
The simplest processors are scalar processors. Each instruction executed by a scalar processor typically manipulates one or two data items at a time. By contrast, each instruction executed by a vector processor operates simultaneously on many data items. An analogy is the difference between scalar and vector arithmetic. A superscalar processor is sort of a mixture of the two. Each instruction processes one data item, but there are multiple redundant functional units within each CPU thus multiple instructions can be processing separate data items concurrently.
Superscalar CPU design emphasizes improving the instruction dispatcher accuracy, and allowing it to keep the multiple functional units in use at all times. This has become increasingly important when the number of units increased. While early superscalar CPUs would have two ALUs and a single FPU, a modern design such as the PowerPC 970 includes four ALUs, two FPUs, and two SIMD units. If the dispatcher is ineffective at keeping all of these units fed with instructions, the performance of the system will suffer.
A superscalar processor usually sustains an execution rate in excess of one instruction per machine cycle. But merely processing multiple instructions concurrently does not make an architecture superscalar, since pipelined, multiprocessor or multi-core architectures also achieve that, but with different methods.
In a superscalar CPU the dispatcher reads instructions from memory and decides which ones can be run in parallel, dispatching them to redundant functional units contained inside a single CPU. Therefore a superscalar processor can be envisioned having multiple parallel pipelines, each of which is processing instructions simultaneously from a single instruction thread.
[edit] Limitations
Available performance improvement from superscalar techniques is limited by two key areas:
- The degree of intrinsic parallelism in the instruction stream, i.e. limited amount of instruction-level parallelism, and
- The complexity and time cost of the dispatcher and associated dependency checking logic.
Existing binary executable programs have varying degrees of intrinsic parallelism. In some cases instructions are not dependent on each other and can be executed simultaneously. In other cases they are inter-dependent: one instruction impacts either resources or results of the other. The instructions a = b + c; d = e + f can be run in parallel because none of the results depend on other calculations. However, the instructions a = b + c; d = a + f might not be runnable in parallel, depending on the order in which the instructions complete while they move through the units.
When the number of simultaneously issued instructions increases, the cost of dependency checking increases extremely rapidly. This is exacerbated by the need to check dependencies at run time and at the CPU’s clock rate. This cost includes additional logic gates required to implement the checks, and time delays through those gates. Research shows the gate cost in some cases may be nk gates, and the delay cost k2logn, where n is the number of instructions in the processor’s instruction set, and k is the number of simultaneously dispatched instructions. In mathematics, this is called a combinatoric problem involving permutations.
Even though the instruction stream may contain no inter-instruction dependencies, a superscalar CPU must nonetheless check for that possibility, since there is no assurance otherwise and failure to detect a dependency would produce incorrect results.
No matter how advanced the semiconductor process or how fast the switching speed, this places a practical limit on how many instructions can be simultaneously dispatched. While process advances will allow ever greater numbers of functional units (e.g, ALUs), the burden of checking instruction dependencies grows so rapidly that the achievable superscalar dispatch limit is fairly small. — likely on the order of five to six simultaneously dispatched instructions.
However even given infinitely fast dependency checking logic on an otherwise conventional superscalar CPU, if the instruction stream itself has many dependencies, this would also limit the possible speedup. Thus the degree of intrinsic parallelism in the code stream forms a second limitation.
[edit] Alternatives
Collectively, these two limits drive investigation into alternative architectural performance increases such as Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW), Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC), simultaneous multithreading (SMT), and multi-core processors.
With VLIW, the burdensome task of dependency checking by hardware logic at run time is removed and delegated to the compiler. Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) is like VLIW, with extra cache prefetching instructions.
Simultaneous multithreading, often abbreviated as SMT, is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of superscalar CPUs. SMT permits multiple independent threads of execution to better utilize the resources provided by modern processor architectures.
Superscalar processors differ from multi-core processors in that the redundant functional units are not entire processors. A single processor is composed of finer-grained functional units such as the ALU, integer multiplier, integer shifter, floating point unit, etc. There may be multiple versions of each functional unit to enable execution of many instructions in parallel. This differs from a multicore CPU that concurrently processes instructions from multiple threads, one thread per core. It also differs from a pipelined CPU, where the multiple instructions can concurrently be in various stages of execution, assembly-line fashion.
The various alternative techniques are not mutually exclusive—they can be (and frequently are) combined in a single processor. Thus a multicore CPU is possible where each core is an independent processor containing multiple parallel pipelines, each pipeline being superscalar. Some processors also include vector capability.
[edit] See also
- Super-threading
- Simultaneous multithreading
- Speculative execution / Eager execution
- Software lockout, a multiprocessor issue similar to logic dependencies on superscalars
[edit] References
- Mike Johnson, Superscalar Microprocessor Design, Prentice-Hall, 1991, ISBN 0-13-875634-1
- Sorin Cotofana, Stamatis Vassiliadis, “On the Design Complexity of the Issue Logic of Superscalar Machines”, EUROMICRO 1998: 10277-10284
- Steven McGeady, “The i960CA SuperScalar Implementation of the 80960 Architecture”, IEEE 1990, pp. 232-240
- Steven McGeady, et al., “Performance Enhancements in the Superscalar i960MM Embedded Microprocessor,” ACM Proceedings of the 1991 Conference on Computer Architecture (Compcon), 1991, pp. 4-7
[edit] External links
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| Models (Implicit parallelism · Explicit parallelism · Concurrency) · Flynn’s taxonomy (SISD • SIMD • MISD • MIMD) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Multiprocessing (Symmetric · Asymmetric) · Memory (NUMA · COMA · distributed · shared · distributed shared) · SMT MPP · Superscalar · Vector processor · Supercomputer · Beowulf | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| POSIX Threads · OpenMP · MPI · UPC · Intel Threading Building Blocks · Boost.Thread Instruction pipelineFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Basic five-stage pipeline in a RISC machine (IF = Instruction Fetch, ID = Instruction Decode, EX = Execute, MEM = Memory access, WB = Register write back). The vertical axis is successive instructions, the horizontal axis is time. So in the green column, the earliest instruction is in WB stage, and the latest instruction is undergoing instruction fetch. An instruction pipeline is a technique used in the design of computers and other digital electronic devices to increase their instruction throughput (the number of instructions that can be executed in a unit of time). The fundamental idea is to split the processing of a computer instruction into a series of independent steps, with storage at the end of each step. This allows the computer's control circuitry to issue instructions at the processing rate of the slowest step, which is much faster than the time needed to perform all steps at once. The term pipeline refers to the fact that each step is carrying data at once (like water), and each step is connected to the next (like the links of a pipe.) The origin of pipelining is thought to be either the ILLIAC II project or the IBM Stretch project. The IBM Stretch Project proposed the terms, "Fetch, Decode, and Execute" that became common usage. Most modern CPUs are driven by a clock. The CPU consists internally of logic and memory (flip flops). When the clock signal arrives, the flip flops take their new value and the logic then requires a period of time to decode the new values. Then the next clock pulse arrives and the flip flops again take their new values, and so on. By breaking the logic into smaller pieces and inserting flip flops between the pieces of logic, the delay before the logic gives valid outputs is reduced. In this way the clock period can be reduced. For example, the RISC pipeline is broken into five stages with a set of flip flops between each stage.
Hazards: When a programmer (or compiler) writes assembly code, they make the assumption that each instruction is executed before execution of the subsequent instruction is begun. This assumption is invalidated by pipelining. When this causes a program to behave incorrectly, the situation is known as a hazard. Various techniques for resolving hazards such as forwarding and stalling exist. A non-pipeline architecture is inefficient because some CPU components (modules) are idle while another module is active during the instruction cycle. Pipelining does not completely cancel out idle time in a CPU but making those modules work in parallel improves program execution significantly. Processors with pipelining are organized inside into stages which can semi-independently work on separate jobs. Each stage is organized and linked into a 'chain' so each stage's output is fed to another stage until the job is done. This organization of the processor allows overall processing time to be significantly reduced. Unfortunately, not all instructions are independent. In a simple pipeline, completing an instruction may require 5 stages. To operate at full performance, this pipeline will need to run 4 subsequent independent instructions while the first is completing. If 4 instructions that do not depend on the output of the first instruction are not available, the pipeline control logic must insert a stall or wasted clock cycle into the pipeline until the dependency is resolved. Fortunately, techniques such as forwarding can significantly reduce the cases where stalling is required. While pipelining can in theory increase performance over an unpipelined core by a factor of the number of stages (assuming the clock frequency also scales with the number of stages), in reality, most code does not allow for ideal execution.
[edit] Advantages and DisadvantagesPipelining does not help in all cases. There are several possible disadvantages. An instruction pipeline is said to be fully pipelined if it can accept a new instruction every clock cycle. A pipeline that is not fully pipelined has wait cycles that delay the progress of the pipeline. Advantages of Pipelining:
Disadvantages of Pipelining:
[edit] Examples[edit] Generic pipelineTo the right is a generic pipeline with four stages:
The top gray box is the list of instructions waiting to be executed; the bottom gray box is the list of instructions that have been completed; and the middle white box is the pipeline. Execution is as follows:
[edit] BubbleWhen a "hiccup" in execution occurs, a "bubble" is created in the pipeline in which nothing useful happens. In cycle 2, the fetching of the purple instruction is delayed and the decoding stage in cycle 3 now contains a bubble. Everything "behind" the purple instruction is delayed as well but everything "ahead" of the purple instruction continues with execution. Clearly, when compared to the execution above, the bubble yields a total execution time of 8 clock ticks instead of 7. Bubbles are like stalls, in which nothing useful will happen for the fetch, decode, execute and writeback. It can be completed with a nop code. [edit] Example 1A typical instruction to add two numbers might be LOAD A, R1 The locations 'R1' and 'R2' are registers in the CPU. The values stored in memory locations labeled 'A' and 'B' are loaded (copied) into these registers, then added, and the result is stored in a memory location labeled 'C'. In this example the pipeline is three stages long- load, execute, and store. Each of the steps are called pipeline stages. On a non-pipelined processor, only one stage can be working at a time so the entire instruction has to complete before the next instruction can begin. On a pipelined processor, all of the stages can be working at once on different instructions. So when this instruction is at the execute stage, a second instruction will be at the decode stage and a 3rd instruction will be at the fetch stage. Pipelining doesn't reduce the time it takes to complete an instruction rather it increases the number of instructions that can be processed at once and it reduces the delay between completed instructions- called 'throughput'. The more pipeline stages a processor has, the more instructions it can be working on at once and the less of a delay there is between completed instructions. Every microprocessor manufactured today uses at least 2 stages of pipeline.[citation needed] (The Atmel AVR and the PIC microcontroller each have a 2 stage pipeline). Intel Pentium 4 processors have 20 stage pipelines. [edit] Example 2To better visualize the concept, we can look at a theoretical 3-stage pipeline:
and a pseudo-code assembly listing to be executed: LOAD #40, A ; load 40 in A This is how it would be executed:
The LOAD instruction is fetched from memory.
The LOAD instruction is executed, while the MOVE instruction is fetched from memory.
The LOAD instruction is in the Store stage, where its result (the number 40) will be stored in the register A. In the meantime, the MOVE instruction is being executed. Since it must move the contents of A into B, it must wait for the ending of the LOAD instruction.
The STORE instruction is loaded, while the MOVE instruction is finishing off and the ADD is calculating. And so on. Note that, sometimes, an instruction will depend on the result of another one (like our MOVE example). When more than one instruction references a particular location for an operand, either reading it (as an input) or writing it (as an output), executing those instructions in an order different from the original program order can lead to hazards (mentioned above). There are several established techniques for either preventing hazards from occurring, or working around them if they do. [edit] ComplicationsMany designs include pipelines as long as 7, 10 and even 20 stages (like in the Intel Pentium 4) The later "Prescott" and "Cedar Mill" Pentium 4 cores (and their Pentium D derivatives) had a 31-stage pipeline, the longest in mainstream consumer computing. The Xelerator X10q has a pipeline more than a thousand stages long[1] . The downside of a long pipeline is when a program branches, the entire pipeline must be flushed, a problem that branch prediction helps to alleviate. Branch prediction itself can end up exacerbating the problem if branches are predicted poorly. In certain applications, such as supercomputing, programs are specially written to branch rarely and so very long pipelines are ideal to speed up the computations, as long pipelines are designed to reduce clocks per instruction (CPI). If branching happens constantly, re-ordering branches such that the more likely to be needed instructions are placed into the pipeline can significantly reduce the speed losses associated with having to flush failed branches. Programs such as gcov can be used to examine how often particular branches are actually executed using a technique known as coverage analysis, however such analysis is often a last resort for optimization. The higher throughput of pipelines falls short when the executed code contains many branches: the processor cannot know where to read the next instruction, and must wait for the branch instruction to finish, leaving the pipeline behind it empty. After the branch is resolved, the next instruction has to travel all the way through the pipeline before its result becomes available and the processor appears to "work" again. In the extreme case, the performance of a pipelined processor could theoretically approach that of an un-pipelined processor, or even slightly worse if all but one pipeline stages are idle and a small overhead is present between stages. Because of the instruction pipeline, code that the processor loads will not immediately execute. Due to this, updates in the code very near the current location of execution may not take effect because they are already loaded into the Prefetch Input Queue. Instruction caches make this phenomenon even worse. This is only relevant to self-modifying programs. [edit] See also[edit] External links
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