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EV8: The Post-ultimate Alpha

Thursday February 27, 2003
Newell-Simon Hall 3305
10:30 AM



Dr. Joel S. Emer
Intel

Through the 1990's the Alpha microprocessors which were designed and sold first by Digital Equipment Corporation and then by Compaq Computer Coroporation were widely considered to be the fastest microprocessors in the market. Recently, however, Compaq decided to migrate away from Alpha-based system and stopped development of its next generation Alpha microprocessor, the EV8. Since the EV8 is not going to be produced, I plan to use this talk to present some of the design objectives and ideas that were planned for EV8.

One of the key features of the EV8 was to be "simultaneous multi-threading" or SMT. Over the last few years, this new style of hardware multithreaded architecture was explored by researchers at Compaq (then DEC) and at the University of Washington. This technique allows a single microprocessor to achieve up to 2X throughput increases at a relatively low implementation cost. Therefore, in the first part of this talk, I will give some of the motivation for SMT and an overview of how we had intended to implement it in EV8.

In the second part of the talk I will present an overview of some of the other characteristics of the design and try to explain the rational behind some of those design choices. Finally, I will present some performance estimates of the EV8 CPU.


Dr. Joel S. Emer is an Intel Fellow, Enterprise Platforms Group, and Director of Microarchitecture Research where he is leading architectural research efforts for future processors. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, and M.S.E.E. and B.S.E.E. degrees from Purdue University. Before joining Intel he spent 22 years as a Digital/Compaq employee, where he worked on processor performance analysis and performance modeling methodologies for a number of VAX and Alpha CPUs. He also has researched heterogeneous distributed systems and networked file systems at DEC and during a three year sabbatical at MIT. His current research interests include multithreaded processor organizations, techniques for increased instruction level parallelism, pipeline organziation, instruction and data cache organizations, branch prediction schemes, and performance modeling.

 

 

Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringCarnegie Mellon UniversitySchool of Computer Science