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Superscalar Architecture

April 25, 2007 by Ilya Rosenberg (not verified), 2 years 30 weeks ago
Comment: 22168

I read the introductory PDF on their web site. Interesting stuff.

What these guys are doing is trying to replace the superscalar architecture (which eats up a lot of transistors and power on architectures such as the x86 for things such as register renaming out of order execution). The advantage this has over x86s is that you could cram more cores on the same die because you'd be wasting less chip real-estate and you should be less sensitive to delays due to cache misses. You might also use the ALUs better. The advantage this has over GPU type processors is that GPU processors typically want to repeat the same operations on similar data (for example, processing 16 pixels in parallel), and if branches are taken, GPUs want to branch the same way for all the pixels. This architecture doesn't have that same requirement.

I think it's a nice idea, but I doubt they could get anywhere close to the performance of x86 chips or GPUs any time soon unless they get major funding and access to the high end fabs. Still, it's interesting research... cool to see people trying a different approach.

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