Itanium Rising: Breaking Through Moore's Second Law of Computing Power

In Summary

• EPIC architecture enables the processor to give some hints as to which level of cache should be used to store different variables or functions. By doing so, the processor can rank what it places in memory on the basis of which instructions it will need loaded first.

• Predication allows the virtual elimination of branches and can avoid the problems of misprediction of the branch outcome.

• The branch prediction table resides directly on the chip itself. The table is used to collect real-time information on what the program is doing: It builds statistics on which branch is used and how often.

• Speculation reduces the memory's latency, which is the delay time to access the memory, while software pipelining allows faster execution of loops in ...