Multithreading Decoupled Architectures for Complexity-Effective General Purpose Computing Michael Sung, Ronny Krashinslcy, and Krste Asanovi~ MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA 02139 {darkman Ironnylkrste}@mit- edu ABSTRACT Decoupled architectures have not traditionally been used in the context of general purpose computing because of their inability to tolerate control-intensive code that exists across a wide range of applications. This work investigates the possibility of using multithreading to overcome the loss of decoupling dependencies that represent the cause of this main limitation in decoupled architectures. A proposal for a multithreaded decoupled control/access/execute architecture is presented as a platform for achieving high performance on general purpose workloads. It is argued that such a decoupled architecture is more complexity-effective and scalable than comparable superscalar processors, which incorporate enormous amounts of complexity for modest performance gains. 1 INTRODUCTION rectums are beginning m use more complexity-effective designs [15]. Some superscalar processors use a clustered organization to simplify issue logic, [12] whereby instructions are directed to separate clusters with independent register files and functional units. Additionally some designs are incorporating deep queues to decouple instruction fetch from execution [10]. These designs are being forced to take on some of the attributes of decoupled architectures as
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