In my previous article, Understanding the Microprocessor, I gave a high-level overview of what a microprocessor is and how it functions. I talked about the kinds of tasks it performs and the different ...

Selecting the right DSP for a particular application involves much more analysis than simply selecting the one that touts the highest clock speeds or the one that offers the most arithmetic resources.

At Interop 2009 in Las Vegas this week, RMI Corp unleashed its Superscalar XLP processor, the highest performing in the industry with unmatched system and performance scalability, the company said.

For more than three decades, modern CPUs have relied on speculative execution to keep pipelines full. When it emerged in the ...

Most computer architectures today are able to execute a few instructions in parallel on a single core by having multiple control and arithmetic-logic units. The order of execution may be scheduled by ...

What then, is the major obstacle that is in the way of producing, say, 10GHz processors? For a start the Intel blog says heat is a problem but isn't the biggest hurdle that needs to be overcome to ...

“The memory wall places a significant limit on performance for many modern workloads. These applications feature complex chains of dependent, indirect memory accesses, which cannot be picked up by ...

If you've been reading Ars for any length of time, then you know that there are two terms that always come up in any of my articles: pipelining and superscalar execution. These two fundamental ...