PERL – a Register-Less Processor
PERL { A Register-Less Processor A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by P. Suresh to the Department of Computer Science & Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur February, 2004 Certificate Certified that the work contained in the thesis entitled \PERL { A Register-Less Processor", by Mr.P. Suresh, has been carried out under my supervision and that this work has not been submitted elsewhere for a degree. (Dr. Rajat Moona) Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. February, 2004 ii Synopsis Computer architecture designs are influenced historically by three factors: market (users), software and hardware methods, and technology. Advances in fabrication technology are the most dominant factor among them. The performance of a proces- sor is defined by a judicious blend of processor architecture, efficient compiler tech- nology, and effective VLSI implementation. The choices for each of these strongly depend on the technology available for the others. Significant gains in the perfor- mance of processors are made due to the ever-improving fabrication technology that made it possible to incorporate architectural novelties such as pipelining, multiple instruction issue, on-chip caches, registers, branch prediction, etc. To supplement these architectural novelties, suitable compiler techniques extract performance by instruction scheduling, code and data placement and other optimizations. The performance of a computer system is directly related to the time it takes to execute programs, usually known as execution time. The expression for execution time (T), is expressed as a product of the number of instructions executed (N), the average number of machine cycles needed to execute one instruction (Cycles Per Instruction or CPI), and the clock cycle time (), as given in equation 1.
[Show full text]