Hierarchical scheduling windows

Large scheduling windows are an effective mechanism for increasing microprocessor performance through the extraction of instruction level parallelism. Current techniques do not scale effectively for very large windows, leading to slow wakeup and select logic as well as large complicated bypass networks. This paper introduces a new instruction scheduler implementation, referred to as Hierarchical Scheduling Windows or HSW, which exploits latency tolerant instructions in order to reduce implementation complexity. HSW yields a very large instruction window that tolerates wakeup, select, and bypass latency, while extracting significant far flung ILP. Results: It is shown that HSW loses <0.5% performance per additional cycle of bypass/select/wakeup latency as compared to a monolithic window that loses /spl sim/5% per additional cycle. Also, HSW achieves the performance of traditional implementations with only 1/3 to 1/2 the number of entries in the critical timing path.