An Enhancement for a Scheduling Logic Pipelined over two Cycles

Out of order processors use the dynamic scheduling logic both to expose and to exploit parallelism. Pipelining this logic may sacrifice the ability to execute dependent instructions in consecutive cycles. Several previous studies have shown that pipelining the scheduling logic over two cycles degrades performance; our evaluations, in a 4-way machine, on SPEC-2000 integer benchmarks show a performance degradation about 11% compared to an unpipelined scheduling logic. In this work, we present two non-speculative enhancements for a scheduling logic pipelined over two cycles. The idea is computing in advance which instructions will be woken-up by all instructions that are currently competing for selection. Once all of them have been selected, the pre-computed group of instructions can compete for selection in next cycle. The enhancement goal is to tolerate the scheduling-loop latency when not enough ILP is available through the scheduling of dependent instructions in consecutive cycles. Our results in a 4-way machine show that our two proposed enhancements perform, on average, slightly better than two previously proposed speculative schedulers. The performance of our proposals is within a 2.6% and 2% of an unpipelined ideal scheduler.