POWER2: Next generation of the RISC System/6000 family

Since its announcement, the IBM RISC System/6000® processor has characterized the aggressive instruction-level parallelism approach to achieving performance. Recent enhancements to the architecture and implementation provide greater superscalar capability. This paper describes the architectural extensions which improve storage reference bandwidth, allow hardware square-root computation, and speed floating-point-to-integer conversion. The implementation, which exploits these extensions and doubles the number of functional units, is also described. A comparison of performance results on a variety of industry standard benchmarks demonstrates that superscalar capabilities are an attractive alternative to aggressive clock rates.