Fifty years of microarchitecture

ABSTRACT

The Micro-34 program will be placed in the context of fifty years of research inmicroarchitecture.Over this time, the major emphasis has been on improving processorperformance as measured by Clock per Instruction (CPI).We have seen a number of questions that occupied many minds for many years:Stack architectures compared to memory-to-memory and register files, and RISC vs. CISC are examples.For the last fifteen years or so, the focus of much research has been improvements in CPI by exploiting instruction level parallelism by the processor.This emphasis continues with the papers at Micro-34.