The aim of the PowerPC (G3) 750 is to improve floating point and data transfer performance. Although it remains as a 4 stages of pipeline, the EX stage increases the no. of EUs to 6. In additional, it is also noted that the floating point unit is further divided into 3 stages to implement a floating point pipeline within the FU. The 750 separates the load/store operation into an independent EU. The additional of resource are attempts to segregate tasks into concurrent process to ensure a smooth flow in the pipeline. The 750 retires instructions and dispatch instructions both at rate of two. This is especially true to maintain the retire rate equal or lower than the dispatch rate. Otherwise, the completion unit will be under utilized or idle most of the time. An interesting difference between the 601 and the 750 is the reduction of instruction fetch rate. The 601 has an instruction queue of 8 and it fetches 8 instructions per cycle from the cache line. Surprisingly, the 750 only fetch 4 instructions! The reason can be explained as follows. The 601 can only fetch 8 instructions after the last instruction is dispatched, hence for every 8 instructions, an unknown delay is incur when those 8 instructions are being fetched. As a result, the performance of the pipeline will be affected. In the 750, a fetch rateof 4 instructions is chosen instead to balance between the time required to fetch from cache and the instruction dispatch rate. While the 2 instructions at the bottom of the queue are being dispatched, new instructions are being fetched and place on top of the queue, hence creating a kind of pipelining in the queue. It is also observed that several attempts are made to ensure that the pipeline maintains a high dispatch rate. Efforts to increase the no of EUs,introduction of pipeline within FPU and LSU and increasing the number of reservation stations are made. To reduce dispatch unit stalls due to instruction data dependencies, the 750 also provides a single entry reservation station for individual EUs. For additional information, pls refer to [IBM750].
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