An Instruction Fetch Unit for a High-Performance Personal Computer
- 1 August 1984
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Computers
- Vol. C-33 (8), 712-730
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tc.1984.5009357
Abstract
The instruction fetch unit (IFU) of the Dorado personal computer speeds up the emulation of instructions by prefetching, decoding, and preparing later instructions in parallel with the execution of earlier ones. It dispatches the machine's microcoded processor to the proper starting address for each instruction, and passes the instruction's fields to the processor on demand. A writeable decoding memory allows the IFU to be specialized to a particular instruction set, as long as the instructions are an integral number of bytes long. There are implementations of specialized instruction sets for the Mesa, Lisp, and Smalltalk languages. The IFU is implemented with a six-stage pipeline, and can decode an instruction every 60 ns. Under favorable conditions the Dorado can execute instructions at this peak rate (16 mips).Keywords
This publication has 12 references indexed in Scilit:
- A processor for a high-performance personal computerPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1980
- Implications of structured programming for machine architectureCommunications of the ACM, 1978
- The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementationPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1978
- The CRAY-1 computer systemCommunications of the ACM, 1978
- The development of the MU5 computer systemCommunications of the ACM, 1978
- Pipeline ArchitectureACM Computing Surveys, 1977
- The TI ASCPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1972
- An empirical study of FORTRAN programsSoftware: Practice and Experience, 1971
- The IBM System/360 Model 91: Machine Philosophy and Instruction-HandlingIBM Journal of Research and Development, 1967
- An Efficient Algorithm for Exploiting Multiple Arithmetic UnitsIBM Journal of Research and Development, 1967