On instruction windowing for fine grain parallelism in high-performance processors

Fine grain parallelism is an effective approach to enhancing processor performance through multiple and possibly out of order instruction issue and execution. The authors define, design and evaluate a basic central window, which works with a dynamic instruction stream. Several schemes are presented to reduce the window's potential impact on processor cycle time and its hardware cost. It is shown that a central window can function effectively as a buffer for speculative execution and for handling interrupts and exceptions. >