Evaluation of pseudo vector processor based on slide-windowed registers

We present a new scalar processor for high-speed vector processing and its evaluation. The proposed processor can hide long main memory access latency by introducing slide-windowed floating-point registers with data preloading feature and pipelined memory. Owing to the slide-window structure, the proposed processor can utilize more floating-point registers in keeping upward compatibility with existing scalar architecture. We have evaluated its performance on Livermore Fortran Kernels. The evaluation results show that the proposed processor drastically reduces the penalty of main memory access compared with an ordinary scalar processor. For example, the proposed processor with 96 registers hides memory access latency of 70 CPU cycles when the throughput of main memory is 8 byte/cycle. From these results, it is concluded that the proposed architecture is very suitable for high-speed vector processing.<>