|
Out-of-order Execution
In computer engineering, out-of-order execution (or more formally dynamic execution) is a paradigm used in most high-performance central processing units to make use of instruction cycles that would otherwise be wasted. In this paradigm, a processor executes instructions in an order governed by the availability of input data and execution units, rather than by their original order in a program. In doing so, the processor can avoid being idle while waiting for the preceding instruction to complete and can, in the meantime, process the next instructions that are able to run immediately and independently. History Out-of-order execution is a restricted form of data flow computation, which was a major research area in computer architecture in the 1970s and early 1980s. The first machine to use out-of-order execution was the CDC 6600 (1964), designed by James E. Thornton, which uses a scoreboard to avoid conflicts. It permits an instruction to execute if its source operand (read) a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Engineering
Computer engineering (CoE or CpE) is a branch of electrical engineering and computer science that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineers not only require training in electronic engineering, software design, and hardware-software integration, but also in software engineering. It uses the techniques and principles of electrical engineering and computer science, but also covers areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, computer networks, computer architecture and operating systems. Computer engineers are involved in many hardware and software aspects of computing, from the design of individual microcontrollers, microprocessors, personal computers, and supercomputers, to circuit design. This field of engineering not only focuses on how computer systems themselves work, yet it also demands them to integrate into the larger picture. Robots are one of the applicatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CDC Cyber
The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation (CDC) during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. They were used for modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical machining analysis, probabilistic analysis, energy and academic computing, radiation shielding modeling, and other applications. The lineup also included the Cyber 18 and Cyber 1000 minicomputers. Like their predecessor, the CDC 6600, they were unusual in using the ones' complement binary representation. Models The Cyber line included five different series of computers: * The 70 and 170 series based on the architecture of the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600 supercomputers, respectively * The 200 series based on the CDC STAR-100 - released in the 1970s. * The 180 series developed by a team in Canada - released in the 1980s (after the 200 series) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motorola 88110
The MC88110 was a microprocessor developed by Motorola that implemented the 88000 instruction set architecture (ISA). The MC88110 was a second-generation implementation of the 88000 ISA, succeeding the MC88100. It was designed for use in personal computers and workstations. History The first technical description of the MC88110 was given in November 1991 at the Microprocessor Forum held in San Francisco. The microprocessor was introduced in 1992, operating at 50 MHz. Users were Data General in their AViiON servers, Harris in real-time UNIX systems and Motorola in their single-board computers. NeXT was to introduce a workstation using the MC88110, the NeXT RISC Workstation, but they left the hardware business and cancelled the product before development had completed. Description It implemented extensions to the original ISA, such a separate floating-point register file, extended-precision (80-bit) floating-point data types and new integer and graphics instructions. It al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moore's Law
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), who in 1965 posited a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. While Moore did not use empirical evidence in forecasting that the historical trend would continue, his prediction held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law". Moore's prediction has been used in the semiconductor industry to g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scoreboarding
Scoreboarding is a centralized method, first used in the CDC 6600 computer, for dynamically scheduling instructions so that they can execute out of order when there are no conflicts and the hardware is available. In a scoreboard, the data dependencies of every instruction are logged, tracked and strictly observed at all times. Instructions are released only when the scoreboard determines that there are no conflicts with previously issued ("in flight") instructions. If an instruction is stalled because it is unsafe to issue (or there are insufficient resources), the scoreboard monitors the flow of executing instructions until all dependencies have been resolved before the stalled instruction is issued. In essence: reads proceed on the absence of write hazards, and writes proceed in the absence of read hazards. Scoreboarding is essentially a hardware implementation of the same underlying algorithm seen in dataflow languages, creating a Directed Acyclic Graph, where the same logic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intel I960
Intel's i960 (or 80960) was a RISC-based microprocessor design that became popular during the early 1990s as an embedded microcontroller. It became a best-selling CPU in that segment, along with the competing AMD 29000. In spite of its success, Intel stopped marketing the i960 in the late 1990s, as a result of a settlement with DEC whereby Intel received the rights to produce the StrongARM CPU. The processor continues to be used for a few military applications. Origin The i960 design was begun in response to the failure of Intel's iAPX 432 design of the early 1980s. The iAPX 432 was intended to directly support high-level languages that supported tagged, protected, garbage-collected memory—such as Ada and Lisp—in hardware. Because of its instruction-set complexity, its multi-chip implementation, and design flaws, the iAPX 432 was very slow in comparison to other processors of its time. In 1984, Intel and Siemens started a joint project, ultimately called BiiN, to cr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry required to perform the functions of a computer's central processing unit. The integrated circuit is capable of interpreting and executing program instructions and performing arithmetic operations. The microprocessor is a multipurpose, clock-driven, register-based, digital integrated circuit that accepts binary data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results (also in binary form) as output. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic, and operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system. The integration of a whole CPU onto a single or a few integrated circuits using Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) greatly reduced the cost of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Superscalar Processor
A superscalar processor is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single instruction per clock cycle, a superscalar processor can execute more than one instruction during a clock cycle by simultaneously dispatching multiple instructions to different execution units on the processor. It therefore allows more throughput (the number of instructions that can be executed in a unit of time) than would otherwise be possible at a given clock rate. Each execution unit is not a separate processor (or a core if the processor is a multi-core processor), but an execution resource within a single CPU such as an arithmetic logic unit. In Flynn's taxonomy, a single-core superscalar processor is classified as an SISD processor (single instruction stream, single data stream), though a single-core superscalar processor that supports short vector operations could ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM System/390
The IBM System/390 is a discontinued mainframe product family implementing the ESA/390, the fifth generation of the System/360 instruction set architecture. The first computers to use the ESA/390 were the Enterprise System/9000 (ES/9000) family, which were introduced in 1990. These were followed by the 9672, Multiprise, and Integrated Server families of System/390 in 1994–1999, using CMOS microprocessors. The ESA/390 succeeded the ESA/370 used in the Enhanced 3090 and 4381 "E" models, and the System/370 architecture last used in the IBM 9370 low-end mainframe. The ESA/390 was succeeded by the 64-bit z/Architecture in 2000. History On February 15, 1988, IBM announced Enterprise Systems Architecture/370 (ESA/370) for 3090 enhanced ("E") models and for 4381 model groups 91E and 92E. In additional to the primary and secondary addressing modes that System/370 Extended Architecture (S/370-XA) supports, ESA has an access register mode in which each use of general register ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
POWER1
The POWER1 is a Integrated circuit, multi-chip Central processing unit, CPU developed and Semiconductor device fabrication, fabricated by IBM that implemented the IBM POWER Instruction Set Architecture, POWER instruction set, instruction set architecture (ISA). It was originally known as the RISC System/6000 CPU or, when in an abbreviated form, the RS/6000 CPU, before introduction of successors required the original name to be replaced with one that used the same naming scheme (POWER''n'') as its successors in order to differentiate it from the newer designs. History The POWER1 was introduced in 1990, with the introduction of the IBM RS/6000 POWERserver Server (computing), servers and POWERstation workstations, which featured the POWER1 clocked at 20, 25 or 30 MHz. The POWER1 received two upgrades, one in 1991, with the introduction of the POWER1+ and in 1992, with the introduction of POWER1++. These upgraded versions were clocked higher than the original POWER1, made possible ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Association For Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, claiming nearly 110,000 student and professional members . Its headquarters are in New York City. The ACM is an umbrella organization for academic and scholarly interests in computer science ( informatics). Its motto is "Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession". History In 1947, a notice was sent to various people: On January 10, 1947, at the Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery at the Harvard computation Laboratory, Professor Samuel H. Caldwell of Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke of the need for an association of those interested in computing machinery, and of the need for communication between them. ..After making some inquiries during May and June, we believe there is ample interest to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
