Advanced Computer Architecture

Emphasis on Processor Core

Instructor: Andreas Moshovos
[email protected]

Fall 2007
 Today’s Lecture
• Course Content:
– Building the best processor
• Who cares
• How to define “best”
• Needs/Metrics
• Forces that determine “needs”
– Applications
– Technology
• What is “Computer Architecture”
– Implementation
• Role of the Architect
• Overview of course policies
 Course Goal
• Advanced uni-processor/single-chip architecture
– Will use the term “processor”
– May touch on multi-core issues

• Previous courses:
• How to build a processor that works
• Some optimization techniques

• This course:
– What is the BEST processor?
– Recent Research Developments

• Some overlap with the undergrad Comp. Arch.

 What is Best?
• Goal:
– Build the best “processor”

• Today this means:

– Here’s a piece of silicon
– Here are some of its properties
– Tell me what to build
• Two challenges:
1. Understand your building blocks:
• today its semiconductors
• We’ll focus on full-custom designs not FPGAs
2. Understand what best means in term of applications
• Take into account design/production time
• Takes 4-5 years to design a new high-performance processor
• Let’s see a few examples
 Technology and Architecture:
What People have been able to do thus far

Transistor speed
improvement

• Source: H&P, CA: A Quantitative Approach 4th Edition

Evolution of Microprocessors

???
 Recent Designs
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-62:
– 243M xtors, 90nm, 2.8Ghz, 220 mm^2, 2 cores
• Intel Core Duo Extreme X6900
– 291M xtors, 65nm, 3.2Ghz, 143 mm^2, 2 cores
• AMD Turion 64 ML-40
– 114M xtors, 90nm, 2.2Ghz, 125mm^2, 1 core
• SUN T1 “Niagara”
– 300M xtors, 90nm, 1.2Ghz, 379 mm^2, 8 cores
 Understanding the Building Blocks

What to remember from the example designs in

terms of technology trends?
 Moore’s “Law”
• “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits”
– G.E. Moore, Electronics, 1965

• Observation: (DRAM) transistor density doubles annually

– Became known as “Moore’s Law”
– Wrong, transistor density doubles every 2 years
• Had only four data points

• Corollaries
– cost / transistor halves annually
– power decreases with scaling
– speed increases with scaling
– reliability increases with scaling (??)
• Not anymore

• Recent trends somewhat different

– We will return to this throughout the lectures
 The Other “Moore’s Law”
• “Performance doubles every 18 months”
– common interpretation of Moore’s Law, not original
intent
– wrong, “performance” doubled every ~2 years
– wrong, lately other parameters slowed down
performance

• Self-fulfilling prophecy (Moore’s Curve)

– doubling every 18 months = ~4% increase per month
– 4% per month used to judge performance
features,
– if feature adds 2 months to schedule, it should add at
least 8% to performance
Intel Processor Family
 Technology Scaling
• ICs characterized by Feature Size
– minimum xtor/wire size in x or y dimension
– 10 microns in 1971, 0.045 microns today, ~220x reduction
• Xtor density:
– quadratic w/ respect to feature size
• Xtor performance:
– complex, but almost linear
– lower Vdd required for correct operation
• Wire Delay:
– complex, distances shorter, but R and C higher/unit.
– net effect, wires do not scale as well as xtors.
• Power:
– dynamic and static. ~CxFxV^2 . Currently a big problem.
• Die Size:
– Mostly unrelated
 Technology Scaling:
Ideal Shrink and Ideal New Design

• Feature Size 30% every 2 to 3 years

• Transistor Density ~50% (0.7x0.7)
• Transistor speed ~50%
• Die size 10% - 20%
• Transistor Count 60%-80%

• IDEAL Shrink: • IDEAL New Design:

– 1x xtors • 2x xtors
– 0.5x area • 1x area
– 1.5x frequency • 1.5x frequency
– 1x IPC • 2x IPC
– 1.5x performance • 3x performance
– 0.5x power • 1x power
Not what is possible most of the time
R. Ronnen et. al. IEEE Proceedings 2001
 FYI: Actual Scaling

Shrink

New uArch

Many factors determine what the new arch should be.

 Technology Scaling Contd.
• DRAM density 40% - 60% (4x in 3 years)
• DRAM speed 4% (1/3 in 10 years)
• Disk density 100% (4x in 2 years)
• Disk speed 4% (1/3 in 10 years)
 Technology Scaling: Latency vs. Bandwidth

• Not all technologies scale similarly

• Source: H&P, CA: A Quantitative Approach 4th Edition
FYI: DRAM/Disk Technology Evolution

•Source: H&P, CA: A Quantitative Approach 4th Edition

Putting things into Perspective
 What Architects Do
• Goal:
– Build the best “processor”

• Two challenges:
1. Understand your building blocks:
• today its semiconductors
2. Understand what best means in application
terms
 What BEST means?
• Really depends on what your goal is:
– Moving: Best take truck - unless you have nothing...
– SUV? I don’t know, you tell me
– Porche? Have money to burn - cruising
• Observation #1:
– Before we can decide what is best we need to know
the Needs are.
• Moving vs. cruising
• Observation #2:
– Then we need to be able to judge how well each
option serves these needs. Metrics
• Truck vs. Porche
• What if you had to build the best car for a given
purpose?
 What BEST processor means?
• Needs:
– Performance: word processing vs. weather
simulation
– Cost: would you pay 5x $ for 2x performance?
– Complexity: Design/validation time -> cost and perf.
– Power: PDA, laptop, server
– Reliability: Must work correctly
• There are a number of forces at work:
– 1. What does the user needs: applications
– 2. What does technology offers: semiconductors
• Why this is challenging:
– Many applications, some yet to be developed
– Technology changes
 What is Computer Architecture?
• Architecture: How are things organized and what you
can do with them (functionality)

• Many different “Architectures” exist in a system

– Application/System architecture
• Structure of the application itself
– Interface to outside world (API, libraries, GUIs, etc.)
– Operating system calls
– Often appear as layers

• For our purposes Computer architecture is the

Interface between hardware and software
 What is Computer Architecture?
System attributes as seen by the programmer
The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by
the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior as distinct from
the organization of the dataflow and controls, the logic design, and the physical
implementation.
Gene Amdahl, IBM Journal of R&D, April 1964

• What the user needs to know to reason about how the machine
behaves

• A contract between users and the designer/architect

– Architect: I guarantee these features, anything else can change
across different designs
– User can develop applications and reason about what they will
do having a guarantee that they will work across different
designs
 Architecture, µArch and Implementation
• Computer “Architecture”: HW/SW interface
– instruction set
– memory management and protection
– interrupts and traps
– floating-point standard (IEEE)
– Could include others: designer beware

• µMarch (micro-Arch): also called organization

– number/location of functional units
– pipeline/cache configuration
– programmer transparent techniques: prefetching

• Implementation (Hardware): low-level circuits

 Architecture vs. Implementation
• AND Gate:
– Architecture is the interface:
• 2 inputs - 1 output and function
• Truth table defines behavior

– Implementation?
• Transistor based (How many can you think?)
– static, dynamic? CMOS, NMOS?
• Moshovos™ implementation
• others?
 Architecture vs. µMarch vs. Impl.
The boundaries are a bit blurred, still
64-bit Adder:
— Arch: What it does
— take two 64-bit numbers produce 64-bit sum
— µMarch: How it does it:
— Ripple carry
— Carry lookahead
— Carry prediction
— Implementation
— static, dynamic, CMOS, Synthesized, Custom, etc...

• This course: Architecture, µMarch and its interactions/

implications to software and implementation
 So what goes into the Arch. Spec.?
• Too much:
– Too restrictive
• Additions take 1 cycle to complete
• Too little:
– Lost opportunity
– Substandard performance
• Subtract and branch if negative is good enough
• Multimedia instruction set extensions

• Challenge is to forsee how technology/application trends

may create problems in the future
– Delay slots
 Role of the Computer (µ)Architect
• Architect: Define hardware/software interface
• µArchitect: Define the hardware organization, usually
same person as above
• Goal:
– 1. Determine important attributes (e.g., performance)
– 2. Design machine to maximize those attributes under
constraints (e.g., cost, complexity, power).
• How : Study applications
Consider underlying technology
Cost
Performance
Complexity
Power
Reliability
 Two Aspects of Architecting
• Techniques:
— This is the accumulated experience
— Typically, there is no formal way of developing these (innovation)
— Know how to evaluate
• When to use them?
RISC architectures: Could fit a CPU within a single chip in the early
80’s

Architecture is a “science” of tradeoffs

No underlying one-truth - we build our own world and mess
Too many options -> too many different ways of being wrong
 Why Study Computer Architecture
• Build faster/better processors
– Why? my MS-Word, Latex runs quite fast on my Pentium 166
MMX thank you very much
– How about weather simulation? Speech recognition? MRI
Processing? MPEG-4 (7?), Your Killer-App circa 2010?
• Bottom line:
– Historically, faster processors facilitated new applications
– Similarly, novel applications created a need for faster machines
– Cost is factor
– Facilitate further scientific development
– Any reason why this will change?
• Also performance not the only requirement
– #1: User requirements are constantly changing
 Implications of Implementation Technology
• Caches (“bad” for IBM-XT, “a must” for Pentium 4):
• 70’s: thousands of xtors, DRAM faster than 8088 microprocessor
• nice way of slowing down your program
• 80’s: depends on machine
• 90’s: millions of xtors, what to do with them, DRAM much slower than
processor
• a must, otherwise your ~3Ghz processor spends most of its time waiting for
memory

• #2: Technology changes rapidly making past

choices often obsolete

• #3: Also opens up new opportunities (e.g., out-of-

order)
 Perpetually Open Problems in CA
• Performance
• Cost
• Complexity
• Power
• Reliability
• Architectural Support for…

• New Challenge:
– Performance does not double every two years
anymore
– Performance only from coarse-grain parallelism
 Texts
• These slides
• • Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Hennessy
and Patterson, 4th Edition, Morgan Kaufmann
• Readings in Computer Architecture, Hill, Jouppi and Sohi.
• Related conference papers - both classic and cutting-edge
• Conferences:
• • ISCA (international symposium on CA)
• • ASPLOS (arch. support for progr. languages & OSes)
• • MICRO (microarchitecture)
• • HPCA (all encompassing?)
• • Others: PACT, ICS...
• GENERAL INFO: www.cs.wisc.edu/~arch/www
• Online papers: www.computer.org, citeseer.nj.nec.com
 About the Course
• Instructors: Andreas Moshovos
• Office hours: via appointment only
• best way to communicate with me: e-mail
– Persist if I don’t respond the “first” time
– [email protected]

• Please use “ACA: Your header here” for all your e-mails
• Course web site: www.eecg.toronto.edu/~moshovos/ACA05
• nothing there yet
• There is no TA

• You are responsible for all material discussed in class

• Notes will not be provided for all discussions
 Schedule
• First half (you attend lectures):
• Lectures on advanced architecture topics
• Some assignments

• • Second half (you give lectures and discuss):

• In groups you select among a set of research papers
• You give a presentation
• We discuss them in class
• You work on a project
• (you define or pick from a set of suggestions)
 Expected Background
• Organization and Comp. Arch. (some overlap)
• Design simple uniprocessor
• Instruction set concepts: registers, instructions, etc.
• Organization
• Datapath design
• Hardwired/microprogrammed control
• Simple pipelining
• Basic caches, main memory
• High-level programming experience (C is a must)
• Compilers (back-end) and VLSI highly desired
• You are expected to read on your own and fill-in any
gaps
 Topics
1. Technology Trends / Performance Metrics / Methodology
2. Pipelining
3. Advanced Instruction Level Parallel Processing
4. Control Flow Prediction
5. Memory System
6. Instruction Set Principles
7. New Challenges: Power/Reliability
8. State-of-the-Art Research Papers and Classics

1 through 7 is my responsibility
8: I provide pointers, you make the presentation, we
discuss the papers in class
 Course Structure
• We’ll start with defining the sequential execution model
• We’ll then look at various ways of relaxing execution
order in the architecture
• We’ll look at an example of a modern high-performance
processor
• We’ll then look at each component separately
 Marking
• This is a grad course: You are expected to be able to
seek information beyond what is discussed in class.
• Project 1/3
• Homeworks 1/3
• Presentations 1/3

– If needed (Intention is NOT to have one):

• Take Home Exam ½ (and everything else x ½)

• You must score at least 5/10 in all of the above

separately to pass
 Project
• This is probably the most important part of the course
• You will be required to propose and conduct “research” in computer
architecture
• — I will provide some suggestions
• — You are strongly encouraged to suggest your own:
• Validate data in some paper
• Evaluate extension to existing work
• Propose something completely new (difficult)
• Since this is a class project negative results are OK
• — In general it is hard to publish negative results
You’ll have ONE MONTH
• You will probably have to use the simplescalar simulator
• Requires strong programming skills in C
• You must be familiar with UNIX or learn your way through it
• Groups of 2 or 3 if necessary (depends on class size too)
• More details coming “soon”
 Homeworks
• There will be 3-4 assignments
• May require material that we do not cover in depth in
class
• There will be series of programming assignments that
are designed to help you learn the simulation
infrastructure that is commonly used in our research
community: www.simplescalar.com
• Assignments require strong programming skills primary
in C
• Also require that you are familiar with UNIX systems
• Environment: cygwin/windows or linux
– I’ll use one, you may have to do minor edits to have
things work at the other (header files)
 Policies
• No late work will be accepted
– You will be given able time to complete all
coursework
– No project extensions past the last day of the course

• All work must be your own unless otherwise

specified
– Please take this seriously
– Make sure to reference any external sources
Why don’t they build chips as big as a
doormat?
 Integrated Circuit Costs

2
wafer _ diameter
π× ( )
2 π × wafer _ diameter
Dies / Wafer = test _ dies
Die _ area 2 × die _ area
 Die Size, Wafer and Yield
• Bigger die Æ less dies per wafer

• Bigger die Æ defects much more probable

 IC Cost Examples
Chip Metal Line Wafer Defect Area Dies/ Yield Die Cost
layers width cost /cm2 mm2 wafer
386DX 2 0.90 $900 1.0 43 360 71% $4
486DX2 3 0.80 $1200 1.0 81 181 54% $12
PPC 601 4 0.80 $1700 1.3 121 115 28% $53
HP PA 7100
3 0.80 $1300 1.0 196 66 27% $73
DEC Alpha
3 0.70 $1500 1.2 234 53 19% $149
SuperSPARC
3 0.70 $1700 1.6 256 48 13% $272
Pentium 3 0.80 $1500 1.5 296 40 9% $417

• From "Estimating IC Manufacturing Costs,” by Linley Gwennap,

Microprocessor Report, August 2, 1993, p. 15

• New products end up being much more expensive to manufacture

 Overview of microarchitectural innovations: Reading #1

• “Microarchitectural Innovations: Boosting Performance

Beyond Technology Scaling”, A. Moshovos and G. S.
Sohi, IEEE Proceedings.

• Read up to section IV for sure

• Would be nice to read the whole thing (only two more
pages ;)
 Reading #2: The Simplescalar Toolkit
• Familiarize with MIPS instruction set
• We’ll be using that throughout the course
 Early Steps: Reading #3 - Optional
• Arthur W. Burks, Herman H. Goldstine, and John von Neumann,
"Preliminary discussion of the logical design of an electronic
computing instrument", 42pp, Inst. for Advanced Study, Princeton,
N. J., June 28, 1946
• Reprinted in: "Computer Structures: Readings and Examples",
(1971 edition) by C. Gordon Bell & Allen Newell

• Interesting Discussions:
– Selection of word length and number base.
– Discussion of the instructions needed.
– Concern for the input/output structure and the idea of displays
– Rationale for not including floating-point arithmetic (caution
about the technology).
– The lack of necessity for the rather trivial binary-decimal
conversion hardware and the idea of cost effectiveness.
– Analysis of the addition, multiplication, and division hardware
implementation. (This description includes a nice, one-page
discussion of the average carry length for addition.)
 The Task of the Referee: Reading #4 – Must
Read
• Evaluating research/engineering work in computer
architecture
 Homework #1
• Fill in an index card
– Provide a photo
– List what program you are in M.A.Sc. Or M.Eng.
• Optional but greatly appreciated:
– Education
– Current Position
• Any details on what you work on
– Programming Languages/OS experience
 Homework #2
• Next lecture
• Study performance with pipelining
Out-of-Order Execution the Big Picture
Program Form Processing Phase

Static program
Dispatch/ dependences
dynamic inst.
Stream (trace) inst. Issue

execution inst execution

window
inst. Reorder &
commit

completed
instructions
 A Generic Superscalar OOO Processor
Branch
Fetch Prediction
Pre-decode

Unit
I-CACHE

Dispatch
Rename
buffer
Load/Store Scheduler
scheduler scheduler
Reorder buffer

RF RF
FUs

FUs

Memory Interface
 A Modern System

CPU CPU CPU

I$ D$ I$ D$ I$ D$

interconnect

L2

Main Memory