HPSm, a high performance restricted data flow architecture having minimal functionality

Abstract

Our recent work in microarchitecture has identified a new model of execution, restricted data flow, in which data flow techniques are used to coordinate out-of-order execution of sequential instruction streams. We believe that the restricted data flow model has great potential for implementing very high performance computing engines. This paper defines a minimal functionality variant of our model, which we are calling HPSm. The instruction set, data path, timing and control of HPSm are all described. A simulator for HPSm has been written, and some of the Berkeley RISC benchmarks have been executed on the simulator. We report the measurements obtained from these benchmarks, along with the measurements obtained for the Berkeley RISC II. The results are encouraging.