Aggressive dynamic execution of decoded traces

We consider the increased performance that can be obtained by using in concert, three previously proposed (and in two cases used in commercial systems) ideas. These ideas are aggressive dynamic (run time) instruction scheduling, reuse of decoded instructions, and trace scheduling. We show that these ideas complement and support one another. Hence, while each of these ideas has been shown to have merit in its own right, when used in concert, we claim the overall advantage is greater than that obtained by using any one singly. To support this claim, we present the results from running several common multimedia kernels. Overall, these results show an average speedup of 3.50 times what can be had by using dynamic instruction scheduling alone.