This lecture presents a study of the microarchitecture of contemporary microprocessors. The focus is on implementation aspects, with discussions on their implications in terms of performance, power, and cost of state-of-the-art designs. The lecture starts with an overview of the different types of microprocessors and a review of the microarchitecture of cache memories. Then, it describes the implementation of the fetch unit, where special emphasis is made on the required support for branch prediction. The next section is devoted to instruction decode with special focus on the particular...