Improvements in Processor Speed
Technology
- Faster clock (commercially 700 Mhz available; prototype 1.5 Ghz)
More transistors = More functionality
- Instruction Level parallelism (ILP)
- Multiple functional units, superscalar or out-of-order execution
- 10 Million transistors but Moore law still applies.
Extensive pipelining
- From single 5 stage to multiple pipes as deep as 20 stages
Sophisticated instruction fetch units
- Branch prediction; register renaming; trace caches
On-chip Memory
- One or two levels of caches. TLB’s for instruction and data