Advances in microprocessor design, integrated circuits, and Compiler technology have increased the interest in parallel Instruction execution. A joint HP-Intel team designed the IA-64 Processor instruction set architecture with parallelism in mind.
Microprocessors continue on the relentless path to provide more performance. Every new innovation in computing "distributed computing on the Internet, data mining, Java programming, and multimedia data streams "requires more cycles and computing power. Even traditional applications such as databases and numerically intensive codes present increasing problem sizes that drive demand for higher performance. Design innovations, compiler technology, manufacturing process improvements, and integrated circuit advances have been driving exponential performance increases in microprocessors.
To continue this growth in the future, Hewlett-Packard and Intel architects examined barriers in contemporary designs and found that instruction-level parallelism (ILP) can be exploited for further performance increases.
This project examines the motivation, architecture, and benefits of the major features of IA-64. .
Background and objectives.
IA-64 is the first architecture to bring ILP features to general-purpose microprocessors.
Parallel semantics, predication, data speculation, large register files, register rotation, .
Control speculation, hardware exception deferral, register stack engine, wide floating-point exponents, and other features contribute to IA-64's primary objective. That goal is to expose, enhance, and exploit ILP in today's applications to increase processor performance.
ILP pioneers developed many of these concepts to find parallelism beyond traditional architectures. Subsequent industry and academic research significantly extended earlier concepts.
Starting in 1994, the joint HP-Intel IA-64 architecture team leveraged this prior work and incorporated feedback from compiler and processor design teams to engineer a powerful initial set of features.
