Performance Study of Multi-core In-Order Superscalar Processor Architecture

In order to overcome the hardware complexity and performance limit problems, recently the multi-core architecture has been prevalent. For hardware simplicity, usually RISC processor is adopted as the unit core processor. However, if the performance of unit core processor is enhanced, the overall performance of the multi-core processor architecture can be further enhanced. In this paper, in-order superscalar processor is utilized as the core for the multi-core processor architecture. Using SPEC 2000 benchmarks as input, the trace-driven simulation has been performed for the number of superscalar cores between 2 and 16 and the window size of 4 to 16 extensively. As a result, the 16-core superscalar processor for the window size of 16 results in 8.4 times speed up over the single core superscalar processor. When compared with the same number of cores, the multi-core superscalar processor performance doubles that of the multi-core RISC processor.