ISCA Logo

ISCA 2000
Tutorial
June 11, 2000




Emerging Processor Techniques for
General-Purpose and Embedded Computing

Sriram Vajapeyam
Analog Devices (On leave from Indian Institute of Science)

ABSTRACT

This significantly upgraded tutorial will cover current and emerging architectural and microarchitectural techniques for both general-purpose and high-end embedded processors. Processor architecture design and evaluation has become exciting, complex, and challenging for both general-purpose and embedded computing -- thanks to increasing performance demands, booming single-chip transistor budgets, and, for embedded processers, programmability, low-cost, and low-power requirements. This tutorial presents the workings of a collection of important recent architectural and micro-architectural techniques for both worlds. For the general-purpose world the focus will be on techniques to exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP). For embedded processors, some architectural and microarchitectural techniques for reduced code size, configurability, signal processing, etc. will be covered. DSP processor techniques will form a major portion of the embedded processors' coverage in this tutorial. Overall, the tutorial will be a quick but substantive tour of important current and emerging processor techniques.

ASSUMED ATTENDEE BACKGROUND

The attendee is assumed to have the following background:

(i) familiarity with basic computer organization;

(ii) exposure to basic aspects of processor pipelining and
    some awareness of microarchitectural techniques (such as
    simple 2-bit branch prediction, register renaming, etc.);

(iii) awareness of the basic workings of primary memory
     subsystem components such as caches.

TUTORIAL RATING

20% Beginner, 50% Intermediate, 30% Advanced.

SPEAKER

Sriram Vajapeyam is currently with Analog Devices, on leave from a faculty position at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His primary research interest is processor architecture, with a significant recent research contribution being Trace Processors. Vajapeyam received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. His previous industry experience includes a year with Cray Research, Inc.


[Back to Tutorials Page]