极高集成度的处理机体系结构——未来计算机技术基础

NEW PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURE WITH EXTREMELY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION(ELSI)—THE FOUNDATION OF THE FUTURE COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

在国际上，计算机学者在讨论下一代的处理机体系结构和未来的计算机技术。因为微电子工艺的迅速发展，已有可能在一个芯片上集成１０亿个晶体管。这样的极高的集成度（ＥＬＳＩ），为计算机体系结构设计者开辟了一个宽广的技术领域和思想空间，容许我们设计出崭新的处理机和计算机芯片。本文综述了目前美国认为有前途的四种所谓ＢｉｌｉｏｎＴｒａｎｓｉｓｔｏｒｓｏｎＣｈｉｐ的体系结构：即单个功能很强的处理机（Ｕ－ＮＩＰＲＯＣ），并发的多线程处理机（ＳＭＴ），片上多处理机系统（ＣＭＰ），和智能随机存储器（ＩＲＡＭ）。这四种体系结构，将充分利用片上指令级并行性ＩＬＰ和线程级的并行性，或充分利用片上数据交换的极高频宽，或充分利用ＣＰＵ和存储器之间的高速频带总线。而这种１０亿晶体管的芯片，可使单片的峰值速度达到１６０亿次／秒。这对未来的计算机技术会带来极其深刻的影响。在这种芯片设计中，体系结构设计者还要十分注意微电子工艺在极高集成度中的一些特殊问题。

Nowadays, the Computer Architecture designers are discussing about the next generation processor architecture and the future computer technology. with the rapid development of Micro-electronics, it is possible to integrate One Billion transistors on one chip. Such Extremely Large Scale Integration(ELSI) extends a wide area for computer architecture designers to construct the wholly new kinds of processor architecture. In this paper, it surveys four kinds of so-called 'Billion Transistors Architeture', i.e.High Performance Uniprocessor(UNIPROC),Simultaneous Multi-Threaded Processor(SMT),Chip Multiprocessors(CMP) and Intelligent RAM(IRAM).These four kinds of processor architecture fully utilize the Instruction Level Parallelism ILP and Thread Level Parallelism, fully utilize the high bandwidth of data transfer on chip, or fully utilize the high between Memory/Processor on chip. The new processor architecture would bring the peak performance reaching 16GFLOPs per chip, it must have the deep influence on the future computer technology. Processor designers should take sufficient consideration of some special issues brought by the micro-electronics implementations for the extremely large scale integration chip.