Description
Out-of-order superscalar microarchitectures are composed of structures which scale poorly with pipeline width in power, cycle time, and area. Many techniques have been proposed to reduce the cost of these structures, some of which have been applied to real microprocessors. A previously proposed banked microarchitecture called "RingScalar" [1] enables large reductions in the complexity of these structures by tailoring the architecture to common patterns in instruction streams, but has never been implemented. This work focuses on an implementation ("RingBOOM") of the RingScalar microarchitecture in the open-source Berkeley Out-of-Order Machine (BOOM). IPC degradation compared to the current BOOM microarchitecture is measured: a relative IPC of 0.82 was observed. Assessment of cycle time and area is then performed with a commercial FinFET technology: RingBOOM core variants achieved synthesized frequencies of up to2.1GHz and were about 25% smaller than the reference design.