30-07-2009, 05:01 PM
The amazing growth of the Internet and telecommunications is powered by ever-faster systems demanding increasingly higher levels of processor performance. To keep up with this demand we cannot rely entirely on traditional approaches to processor design. Microarchitecture techniques used to achieve past processor performance improvement“superpipelining, branch prediction, super-scalar execution, out-of-order execution, caches“have made microprocessors increasingly more complex, have more transistors, and consume more power. In fact, transistor counts and power are increasing at rates greater than processor performance. Processor architects are therefore looking for ways to improve performance at a greater rate than transistor counts and power dissipation. Intel™s Hyper-Threading Technology is one solution.
