Out-of-order retirement of instructions in superscalar, multithreaded, and multicore processors
- Autores: Rafael Ubal Tena
- Directores de la Tesis: Julio Sahuquillo Borras (dir. tes.), Pedro Juan López Rodríguez (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de València ( España ) en 2010
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: José Duato Marín (presid.), Antonio Robles Martínez (secret.), David Kaeli (voc.), José Manuel García Carrasco (voc.), Antonio González Colás (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
Current superscalar processors use a reorder buffer (ROB) to track the instructions in flight. The ROB is implemented as a FIFO queue where instructions are inserted in program order after decoded, and from which they are extracted when they commit, also in program order. The use of this hardware structure provides a simple support for speculation, precise exceptions, and register reclamation. However, retiring instructions in program order may lead to a significant performance degradation if a long-latency operation blocks the ROB head. Several proposals have been published dealing with this problem. Most of them allow instructions to be retired out of order in a speculative manner, so they require checkpoints in order to roll back the processor to a precise state when speculation fails. Checkpoints management usually involves costly hardware and causes an enlargement of other major processor structures, which in turn might impact the processor cycle. This problem affects most state-of-the-art microprocessors, regardless of whether they are single- or multithreaded, or whether they implement one or multiple cores. This thesis spans the study of non-speculative out-of-order retirement of instructions in superscalar, multithreaded, and multicore processors.
