Mind-boggling Trends in Chip Industry:

• Long history since 1971
  • Introduction of Intel 4004
  • http://www.intel4004.com/
• Today we talk about more than one billion transistors on a chip
  • Intel Montecito (in market since July’06) has 1.7B transistors
• Die size has increased steadily (what is a die?)
  • Intel Prescott: 112mm2, Intel Pentium 4EE: 237 mm2, Intel Montecito: 596 mm2
• Minimum feature size has shrunk from 10 micron in 1971 to 0.045 micron today

Agenda:

• Unpipelined microprocessors
• Pipelining: simplest form of ILP
• Out-of-order execution: more ILP
• Multiple issue: drink more ILP
• Scaling issues and Moore’s Law
• Why multi-core
  • TLP and de-centralized design
• Tiled CMP and shared cache
• Implications on software
• Research directions

Unpipelined Microprocessors:

• Typically an instruction enjoys five phases in its life
  • Instruction fetch from memory
  • Instruction decode and operand register read
  • Execute
  • Data memory access
  • Register write
• Unpipelined execution would take a long single cycle or multiple short cycles
  • Only one instruction inside processor at any point in time