A Single-Chip Multiprocessor

ntegrated circuit processing technology offers increasing integration density, which fuels micro-processor performance growth. Within 10 years it will be possible to integrate a billion transistors on a reasonably sized silicon chip. At this integration level, it is necessary to find parallelism to effectively uti-lize the transistors. Currently, processor designs dynam-ically extract parallelism with these transistors by executing many instructions within a single, sequential program in parallel. To find independent instructions within a sequential sequence of instructions, or thread of control, today’s processors increasingly make use of sophisticated architectural features. Examples are out-of-order instruction execution and speculative execu-tion of instructions after branches predicted wit