Chapter 5 – Microarchitecture Design

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on microarchitecture, or implementations of architecture. The x86 architecture has a long history of generations that over many years of changes in process technology and advances in computer architecture have evolved from the very first 8086 to today's Pentium 4 and Athlon. Today's ARM family includes myriad variants, and modern DSP families include processors built over a variety of clock rates and silicon processes. All members of an architectural family have a degree of code compatibility with one another. They also vary widely in terms of price, performance, and functionality, and it is these variations that are discussed in the chapter. This chapter begins with a section on register file design. It continues to pipelining. The next section describes how VLIW machines fetch, decode, and sequence instructions. The next four sections return to topics introduced in the previous chapter, on architectural structures in the ISA design. The chapter concludes with a discussion of power-related issues.