12.2 Fundamental of risc  (Page 5/7)

If the branch “falls through,” then everything is in great shape; the pipeline simply executes the next instruction. It’s as if the branch were a “no-op” instruction. However, if the branch jumps away, those three partially processed instructions never get executed. The first order of business is to discard these “in-flight” instructions from the pipeline. It turns out that because none of these instructions was actually going to do anything until its execute stage, we can throw them away without hurting anything (other than our efficiency). Somehow the processor has to be able to clear out the pipeline and restart the pipeline at the branch destination.

Unfortunately, branch instructions occur every five to ten instructions in many programs. If we executed a branch every fifth instruction and only half our branches fell through, the lost efficiency due to restarting the pipeline after the branches would be 20 percent.

You need optimal conditions to keep the pipeline moving. Even in less-than-optimal conditions, instruction pipelining is a big win — especially for RISC processors. Interestingly, the idea dates back to the late 1950s and early 1960s with the UNI- VAC LARC and the IBM Stretch. Instruction pipelining became mainstreamed in 1964, when the CDC 6600 and the IBM S/360 families were introduced with pipelined instruction units — on machines that represented RISC-ish and CISC designs, respectively. To this day, ever more sophisticated techniques are being applied to instruction pipelining, as machines that can overlap instruction execution become commonplace.

Pipelined floating-point operations

Because the execution stage for floating-point operations can take longer than the execution stage for fixed-point computations, these operations are typically pipelined, too. Generally, this includes floating-point addition, subtraction, multiplication, comparisons, and conversions, though it might not include square roots and division. Once a pipelined floating-point operation is started, calculations continue through the several stages without delaying the rest of the processor. The result appears in a register at some point in the future.

Some processors are limited in the amount of overlap their floating-point pipelines can support. Internal components of the pipelines may be shared (for adding, multiplying, normalizing, and rounding intermediate results), forcing restrictions on when and how often you can begin new operations. In other cases, floating- point operations can be started every cycle regardless of the previous floating- point operations. We say that such operations are fully pipelined .

The number of stages in floating-point pipelines for affordable computers has decreased over the last 10 years. More transistors and newer algorithms make it possible to perform a floating-point addition or multiplication in just one to three cycles. Generally the most difficult instruction to perform in a single cycle is the floating-point multiply. However, if you dedicate enough hardware to it, there are designs that can operate in a single cycle at a moderate clock rate.