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An evaluation of the TRIPS computer system

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Published:07 March 2009Publication History
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Abstract

The TRIPS system employs a new instruction set architecture (ISA) called Explicit Data Graph Execution (EDGE) that renegotiates the boundary between hardware and software to expose and exploit concurrency. EDGE ISAs use a block-atomic execution model in which blocks are composed of dataflow instructions. The goal of the TRIPS design is to mine concurrency for high performance while tolerating emerging technology scaling challenges, such as increasing wire delays and power consumption. This paper evaluates how well TRIPS meets this goal through a detailed ISA and performance analysis. We compare performance, using cycles counts, to commercial processors. On SPEC CPU2000, the Intel Core 2 outperforms compiled TRIPS code in most cases, although TRIPS matches a Pentium 4. On simple benchmarks, compiled TRIPS code outperforms the Core 2 by 10% and hand-optimized TRIPS code outperforms it by factor of 3. Compared to conventional ISAs, the block-atomic model provides a larger instruction window, increases concurrency at a cost of more instructions executed, and replaces register and memory accesses with more efficient direct instruction-to-instruction communication. Our analysis suggests ISA, microarchitecture, and compiler enhancements for addressing weaknesses in TRIPS and indicates that EDGE architectures have the potential to exploit greater concurrency in future technologies.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 44, Issue 3
      ASPLOS 2009
      March 2009
      346 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/1508284
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        ASPLOS XIV: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
        March 2009
        358 pages
        ISBN:9781605584065
        DOI:10.1145/1508244

      Copyright © 2009 ACM

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 7 March 2009

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