Designing the TFP Microprocessor

  • Authors:
  • Peter Yan-Tek Hsu

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Micro
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

Designed to efficiently support large, real-world, floating-point-intensive applications, the TFP (short for Tremendous Floating-Point) microprocessor is a superscalar implementation of the Mips Technologies architecture. This floating-point, computation-oriented processor uses a superscalar machine organization that dispatches up to four instructions each clock cycle to two floating-point execution units, two memory load/store units, and two integer execution units. Its split-level cache structure reduces cache misses by directing integer data references to a 16-Kbyte on-chip cache, while channeling floating-point data references off chip to a 4 Mbyte cache.