Chapter 2

Computer Evolution and

Performance
ENIAC - background
• Electronic Numerical Integrator And
Computer
• Eckert and Mauchly
• University of Pennsylvania
• Trajectory tables for weapons
• Started 1943
• Finished 1946
—Too late for war effort
• Used until 1955
ENIAC - details
• Decimal (not binary)
• 20 accumulators of 10 digits
• Programmed manually by switches
• 18,000 vacuum tubes
• 30 tons
• 15,000 square feet
• 140 kW power consumption
• 5,000 additions per second
von Neumann/Turing
• Stored Program concept
• Main memory storing programs and data
• ALU operating on binary data
• Control unit interpreting instructions from
memory and executing
• Input and output equipment operated by
control unit
• Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies
—IAS
• Completed 1952
Structure of von Neumann machine
IAS - details
• 1000 x 40 bit words
—Binary number
—2 x 20 bit instructions
• Set of registers (storage in CPU)
—Memory Buffer Register
—Memory Address Register
—Instruction Register
—Instruction Buffer Register
—Program Counter
—Accumulator
—Multiplier Quotient
Structure of IAS –
detail
Commercial Computers
• 1947 - Eckert-Mauchly Computer
Corporation
• UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer)
• US Bureau of Census 1950 calculations
• Became part of Sperry-Rand Corporation
• Late 1950s - UNIVAC II
—Faster
—More memory
IBM
• Punched-card processing equipment
• 1953 - the 701
—IBM’s first stored program computer
—Scientific calculations
• 1955 - the 702
—Business applications
• Lead to 700/7000 series
Transistors
• Replaced vacuum tubes
• Smaller
• Cheaper
• Less heat dissipation
• Solid State device
• Made from Silicon (Sand)
• Invented 1947 at Bell Labs
• William Shockley et al.
Transistor Based Computers
• Second generation machines
• NCR & RCA produced small transistor
machines
• IBM 7000
• DEC - 1957
—Produced PDP-1
Microelectronics
• Literally - “small electronics”
• A computer is made up of gates, memory
cells and interconnections
• These can be manufactured on a
semiconductor
• e.g. silicon wafer
Generations of Computer
• Vacuum tube - 1946-1957
• Transistor - 1958-1964
• Small scale integration - 1965 on
—Up to 100 devices on a chip
• Medium scale integration - to 1971
—100-3,000 devices on a chip
• Large scale integration - 1971-1977
—3,000 - 100,000 devices on a chip
• Very large scale integration - 1978 -1991
—100,000 - 100,000,000 devices on a chip
• Ultra large scale integration – 1991 -
—Over 100,000,000 devices on a chip
Moore’s Law
• Increased density of components on chip
• Gordon Moore – co-founder of Intel
• Number of transistors on a chip will double every
year
• Since 1970’s development has slowed a little
— Number of transistors doubles every 18 months
• Cost of a chip has remained almost unchanged
• Higher packing density means shorter electrical
paths, giving higher performance
• Smaller size gives increased flexibility
• Reduced power and cooling requirements
• Fewer interconnections increases reliability
Growth in CPU Transistor Count
IBM 360 series
• 1964
• Replaced (& not compatible with) 7000
series
• First planned “family” of computers
—Similar or identical instruction sets
—Similar or identical O/S
—Increasing speed
—Increasing number of I/O ports (i.e. more
terminals)
—Increased memory size
—Increased cost
• Multiplexed switch structure
DEC PDP-8
• 1964
• First minicomputer (after miniskirt!)
• Did not need air conditioned room
• Small enough to sit on a lab bench
• $16,000
—$100k+ for IBM 360
• Embedded applications & OEM
• BUS STRUCTURE
DEC - PDP-8 Bus Structure
Semiconductor Memory
• 1970
• Fairchild
• Size of a single core
—i.e. 1 bit of magnetic core storage
• Holds 256 bits
• Non-destructive read
• Much faster than core
• Capacity approximately doubles each year
Intel
• 1971 - 4004
—First microprocessor
—All CPU components on a single chip
—4 bit
• Followed in 1972 by 8008
—8 bit
—Both designed for specific applications
• 1974 - 8080
—Intel’s first general purpose microprocessor
Speeding it up
• Pipelining
• On board cache
• On board L1 & L2 cache
• Branch prediction
• Data flow analysis
• Speculative execution
Performance Balance
• Processor speed increased
• Memory capacity increased
• Memory speed lags behind processor
speed
Login and Memory Performance Gap
Solutions
• Increase number of bits retrieved at one
time
—Make DRAM “wider” rather than “deeper”
• Change DRAM interface
—Cache
• Reduce frequency of memory access
—More complex cache and cache on chip
• Increase interconnection bandwidth
—High speed buses
—Hierarchy of buses
I/O Devices
• Peripherals with intensive I/O demands
• Large data throughput demands
• Processors can handle this
• Problem moving data
• Solutions:
—Caching
—Buffering
—Higher-speed interconnection buses
—More elaborate bus structures
—Multiple-processor configurations
Typical I/O Device Data Rates
Key is Balance
• Processor components
• Main memory
• I/O devices
• Interconnection structures
Improvements in Chip Organization and
Architecture
• Increase hardware speed of processor
—Fundamentally due to shrinking logic gate size
– More gates, packed more tightly, increasing clock
rate
– Propagation time for signals reduced
• Increase size and speed of caches
—Dedicating part of processor chip
– Cache access times drop significantly
• Change processor organization and
architecture
—Increase effective speed of execution
—Parallelism
Problems with Clock Speed and Login
Density
• Power
— Power density increases with density of logic and clock
speed
— Dissipating heat
• RC delay
— Speed at which electrons flow limited by resistance and
capacitance of metal wires connecting them
— Delay increases as RC product increases
— Wire interconnects thinner, increasing resistance
— Wires closer together, increasing capacitance
• Memory latency
— Memory speeds lag processor speeds
• Solution:
— More emphasis on organizational and architectural
approaches
Intel Microprocessor Performance
Increased Cache Capacity
• Typically two or three levels of cache
between processor and main memory
• Chip density increased
—More cache memory on chip
– Faster cache access
• Pentium chip devoted about 10% of chip
area to cache
• Pentium 4 devotes about 50%
More Complex Execution Logic
• Enable parallel execution of instructions
• Pipeline works like assembly line
—Different stages of execution of different
instructions at same time along pipeline
• Superscalar allows multiple pipelines
within single processor
—Instructions that do not depend on one
another can be executed in parallel
Diminishing Returns
• Internal organization of processors
complex
—Can get a great deal of parallelism
—Further significant increases likely to be
relatively modest
• Benefits from cache are reaching limit
• Increasing clock rate runs into power
dissipation problem
—Some fundamental physical limits are being
reached
New Approach – Multiple Cores
• Multiple processors on single chip
— Large shared cache
• Within a processor, increase in performance
proportional to square root of increase in
complexity
• If software can use multiple processors, doubling
number of processors almost doubles
performance
• So, use two simpler processors on the chip
rather than one more complex processor
• With two processors, larger caches are justified
— Power consumption of memory logic less than
processing logic
x86 Evolution (1)
• 8080
— first general purpose microprocessor
— 8 bit data path
— Used in first personal computer – Altair
• 8086 – 5MHz – 29,000 transistors
— much more powerful
— 16 bit
— instruction cache, prefetch few instructions
— 8088 (8 bit external bus) used in first IBM PC
• 80286
— 16 Mbyte memory addressable
— up from 1Mb
• 80386
— 32 bit
— Support for multitasking
• 80486
— sophisticated powerful cache and instruction pipelining
— built in maths co-processor
x86 Evolution (2)
• Pentium
— Superscalar
— Multiple instructions executed in parallel
• Pentium Pro
— Increased superscalar organization
— Aggressive register renaming
— branch prediction
— data flow analysis
— speculative execution
• Pentium II
— MMX technology
— graphics, video & audio processing
• Pentium III
— Additional floating point instructions for 3D graphics
x86 Evolution (3)
• Pentium 4
— Note Arabic rather than Roman numerals
— Further floating point and multimedia enhancements
• Core
— First x86 with dual core
• Core 2
— 64 bit architecture
• Core 2 Quad – 3GHz – 820 million transistors
— Four processors on chip

• x86 architecture dominant outside embedded systems

• Organization and technology changed dramatically
• Instruction set architecture evolved with backwards compatibility
• ~1 instruction per month added
• 500 instructions available
• See Intel web pages for detailed information on processors
Embedded Systems
ARM
• ARM evolved from RISC design
• Used mainly in embedded systems
—Used within product
—Not general purpose computer
—Dedicated function
—E.g. Anti-lock brakes in car
Embedded Systems Requirements
• Different sizes
—Different constraints, optimization, reuse
• Different requirements
—Safety, reliability, real-time, flexibility,
legislation
—Lifespan
—Environmental conditions
—Static v dynamic loads
—Slow to fast speeds
—Computation v I/O intensive
—Descrete event v continuous dynamics
Possible Organization of an Embedded System
ARM Evolution
• Designed by ARM Inc., Cambridge,
England
• Licensed to manufacturers
• High speed, small die, low power
consumption
• PDAs, hand held games, phones
—E.g. iPod, iPhone
• Acorn produced ARM1 & ARM2 in 1985
and ARM3 in 1989
• Acorn, VLSI and Apple Computer founded
ARM Ltd.
ARM Systems Categories
• Embedded real time
• Application platform
—Linux, Palm OS, Symbian OS, Windows mobile
• Secure applications
Performance Assessment
Clock Speed
• Key parameters
— Performance, cost, size, security, reliability, power
consumption
• System clock speed
— In Hz or multiples of
— Clock rate, clock cycle, clock tick, cycle time
• Signals in CPU take time to settle down to 1 or 0
• Signals may change at different speeds
• Operations need to be synchronised
• Instruction execution in discrete steps
— Fetch, decode, load and store, arithmetic or logical
— Usually require multiple clock cycles per instruction
• Pipelining gives simultaneous execution of
instructions
• So, clock speed is not the whole story
System Clock
Instruction Execution Rate
• Millions of instructions per second (MIPS)
• Millions of floating point instructions per
second (MFLOPS)
• Heavily dependent on instruction set,
compiler design, processor
implementation, cache & memory
hierarchy
Benchmarks
• Programs designed to test performance
• Written in high level language
— Portable
• Represents style of task
— Systems, numerical, commercial
• Easily measured
• Widely distributed
• E.g. System Performance Evaluation Corporation
(SPEC)
— CPU2006 for computation bound
– 17 floating point programs in C, C++, Fortran
– 12 integer programs in C, C++
– 3 million lines of code
— Speed and rate metrics
– Single task and throughput
SPEC Speed Metric
• Single task
• Base runtime defined for each benchmark using
reference machine
• Results are reported as ratio of reference time to
system run time
— Trefi execution time for benchmark i on reference
machine
— Tsuti execution time of benchmark i on test system

• Overall performance calculated by averaging

ratios for all 12 integer benchmarks
— Use geometric mean
– Appropriate for normalized numbers such as ratios
SPEC Rate Metric
• Measures throughput or rate of a machine carrying out a
number of tasks
• Multiple copies of benchmarks run simultaneously
— Typically, same as number of processors
• Ratio is calculated as follows:
— Trefi reference execution time for benchmark i
— N number of copies run simultaneously
— Tsuti elapsed time from start of execution of program on all N
processors until completion of all copies of program
— Again, a geometric mean is calculated
Amdahl’s Law
• Gene Amdahl [AMDA67]
• Potential speed up of program using
multiple processors
• Concluded that:
—Code needs to be parallelizable
—Speed up is bound, giving diminishing returns
for more processors
• Task dependent
—Servers gain by maintaining multiple
connections on multiple processors
—Databases can be split into parallel tasks
Amdahl’s Law Formula
• For program running on single processor
— Fraction f of code infinitely parallelizable with no
scheduling overhead
— Fraction (1-f) of code inherently serial
— T is total execution time for program on single processor
— N is number of processors that fully exploit parralle
portions of code

• Conclusions
— f small, parallel processors has little effect
— N ->∞, speedup bound by 1/(1 – f)
– Diminishing returns for using more processors
Internet Resources
• http://www.intel.com/
—Search for the Intel Museum
• http://www.ibm.com
• http://www.dec.com
• Charles Babbage Institute
• PowerPC
• Intel Developer Home
References
• AMDA67 Amdahl, G. “Validity of the
Single-Processor Approach to Achieving
Large-Scale Computing Capability”,
Proceedings of the AFIPS Conference,
1967.