1.1 A Quick V iew of Technological Advances 3
Of course, in the more than sixty years of existence of stored program computers,
both the contents of the blocks and the basic instruction execution cycle sequence
have been optimized thoroughly. In this book, we shall look primarily at what can
be found on a microprocessor chip. At the outset, a microprocessor chip contained
the CPU. Over the years, the CPU has been enhanced so that it could be pipelined.
Several functional units have replaced the single ALU. Lower levels of the memory
hierarchy (caches) have been integrated on the chip. Recently, several microproces-
sors and their low-level caches coexist on a single chip, forming chip multiprocessors
(CMPs). Along with these (micro)architectural advances, the strict sequential exe-
cution cycle has been extended so that we can have several instructions proceed
concurrently in each of the basic steps. In Chapters 2 through 6, we examine the
evolution of single processor chips; Chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to multiprocessors.
1.1.2 Te ch n ol ogi cal A d va n ce s
The two domains in which technological advances have had the most impact on the
performance of microprocessor systems have been the increases in clock frequency
and the shrinking of the transistor features leading to higher logic density. In a sim-
plistic way, we can state that increasing clock frequency leads to faster execution,
and more logic yields implementation of more functionality on the chip.
Figure 1.2 shows the evolution of the clock frequencies of the Intel micropro-
cessors from the inception of the 4004 in 1971 to the chip multiprocessors of 2003
and beyond. From 1971 to 2002, we see that processor raw speeds increased at an
exponential rate. The frequency of the 4004, a speck on the figure that cannot be
seen because of the scaling effect, was 1.08 MHz, a factor of 3,000 less than the 3.4
GHz of the Pentium 4. This corresponds roughly to a doubling of the frequency
every 2.5 years. To be fair, though, although the Pentium 4 was the fastest processor
in 2003, there were many mainframes in 1971 that were faster than the 4004. Some
supercomputers in the late 1960s, such as the IBM System 360/91 and Control Data
6600/7600 – two machines that will be mentioned again in this book – had frequen-
cies of over 100 MHz. However, if they were two orders of magnitude faster than
the 4004, they were about six orders of magnitude more expensive. After 2003, the
frequencies stabilize in the 3 GHz range. We shall see very shortly the reason for
such a plateau.
The number of transistors that can be put on a chip has risen at the same pace
as the frequency, but without any leveling off. In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the
founders of Intel, predicted that “the number of transistors on a given piece of sili-
con would double every couple of years.” Although one can quibble over the “cou-
ple of years” by a few months or so, this prediction has remained essentially true and
is now known as Moore’s law. Figure 1.3 shows the exponential progression of tran-
sistors in the Intel microprocessors (notice the log scale). There is a growth factor
of over 2,000 between the 2,300 transistors of the Intel 4004 and the 1.7 billion tran-
sistors of the 2006 Intel dual-core Itanium (the largest number of transistors in the
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