Due to technology's evolution, the number of transistors that can be integrated in a same chip has become, at the dawn of the 21st century, more than sufficient to implement simple superscalar cores. This excess, nowadays generally used for on-chip caches, can also be utilized to improve core's performances, but mainly to increase the core's superscalarness degree. Although it now seems that a high degree is not justified, it could become useful in the future with progress in compilation. Setting out from this observation, we describe a new superscalar architecture with a high out-of-order issue rate. This architecture implements, in particular, precise interrupt management and multiple branch prediction. Furthermore, the architecture's specification has taken into account the aspect of hardware implementation, and thus, temporal matching of pipeline's stages. We therefore assist to a finer partitioning of this pipeline, hence the additional superpipeline label.
展开▼