Processors

emiconductor technologies—along with innovative computer architectures—have provided the bricks and mortar for building phenomenal improvements in processing speed during the past decade, culminating ultimately in the hundreds of millions of transistors used to build increasingly fast on-chip devices. Innovations in computer microarchitecture and accompanying compilers have enabled us to make good use of these building materials to provide high-performance computing systems. Typically, we decide how to use available semicon-ductor resources in two steps. First, we choose the desired functionality—the techniques for extracting and enhancing performance. In the implementatio