Rock: A High-Performance Sparc CMT Processor

Rock, Sun's third-generation chip-multithreading processor, contains 16 high-performance cores, each of which can support two software threads. Rock uses a novel checkpoint-based architecture to support automatic hardware scouting under a load miss, speculative out-of-order retirement of instructions, and aggressive dynamic hardware parallelization of a sequential instruction stream. It is also the first processor to support transactional memory in hardware.