ABSTRACT
The design space for computer architectures is fairly diverse and complicated. Each new architecture strives to fulfill a different set of goals and to carve out a niche in the computer world. A system can be composed of one or several processors. Hardware parallelism can be incorporated within the processors through pipelining and the use of multiple functional units. These methods allow instruction execution to be overlapped in time. Several instructions from the same instruction stream or thread could be executing in each pipeline stage for a pipelined system or in separate functional units for a system with multiple functional units. Most commercial computers use pipelining to increase performance. Significant research has gone into minimizing the clock cycle in a pipeline, determining the problems associated with pipelining an instruction stream, and trying to overcome these problems through techniques such as prefetching instructions and data, compiler techniques, and caching of data and/or instructions.
