Until now, there were few textbooks that focused on the dynamic subject of speculative execution, a topic that is crucial to the development of high performance computer architectures. Speculative Execution in High Performance Computer Architectures describes many recent advances in speculative execution techniques. It covers cutting-edge research projects, as well as numerous commercial implementations that demonstrate the value of this latency-hiding technique.
The book begins with a review of control speculation techniques that use instruction cache prefetching, branch prediction and...

Thisvolumecontainsthesetofpaperspresentedatthe SPECBenchmarkWo- shop 2009 held January 25 in Austin, Texas, USA. The program included eight refereed papers, a keynote talk on virtualization technology benchmarking, an invited paper on power benchmarking and a panel on multi-core benchmarking. EachrefereedpaperwasreviewedbyatleastfourProgramCommitteemembers. The result is a collection of high-quality papers discussing current issues in the area of benchmarking research and technology. A number of people contributed to the success of this workshop.Rudi Eig- mann served as General Chair and ably...

The State of Memory Technology Over the past decade there has been rapid growth in the speed of micropro cessors. CPU speeds are approximately doubling every eighteen months, while main memory speed doubles about every ten years. The International Tech nology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) study suggests that memory will remain on its current growth path. The ITRS short-and long-term targets indicate continued scaling improvements at about the current rate by 2016. This translates to bit densities increasing at two times every two years until the introduction of 8 gigabit dynamic random...