Report Number: CSL-TR-95-661
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Performance Factors for Superscalar Processors
Author: Bennett, James E.
Author: Flynn, Michael J.
Date: February 1995
Abstract: This paper introduces three performance factors for dynamically scheduled superscalar processors. These factors, availability, efficiency, and utility, are then used to explain the variations in performance that occur with different processor and memory system features. The processor features that are investigated are branch prediction depth and following multiple branch paths. The memory system features that are investigated are cache size, associativity, miss penalty, and memory bus bandwidth. Dynamic scheduling with appropriate levels of bus bandwidth and branch prediction is shown to be remarkably effective at achieving good performance over a range of differing application types and over a range of cache miss rates. These results were obtained using a new simulation environment, MXS, which directly executes the benchmarks.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/95/661/CSL-TR-95-661.pdf