Designing performance into i960 superscalar microprocessors

The author outlines two major development efforts designed to maintain the price performance advantage of the Intel i960 family of 32-b embedded processors. These are trace-driven simulation and profile-driven compilers. The trace-driven simulation environment is used to evaluate micro-architectural trade-offs in microprocessor design. This simulation methodology allows the simulation of real applications under a wide variety of process and system configurations. Two-pass profile driven compiler technology allows a compiler to optimize a program based on the execution of that program.<
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