Dynamic Instruction Scheduling Algorithms

For my latest processor design, I want to do a modern processor design. This can mean many things. To me, it means it must have the following qualities:

• Out of Order Execution
• Speculative Execution
• Superscalar
• At least L1 Cache
• Memory Management Unit

The most expensive quality is Out of Order Execution. I had read a paper on OOO using the Tomasulo Algorithm. Really quite helpful. However, the reservation stations are far too expensive to implement. A dual-issue superscalar CPU with out of order execution would require something like a 32 entry Reorder Buffer to be efficient. This would then require 32 reservation stations to hold instructions waiting for their operands to become available. Each reservation station requires at least two slots to compare operand tags and hold operand data, each operand slot requires one tag comparator for each write-back bus. This is waaaay to much resources for the FPGA I have. In fact, it uses > 100% resources on the chip :/

So now I'm researching other alternatives. I would really like to be able to do a four-issue processor, however, I don't think it's possible at this point.

Here are some resources I'm currently reading:

• http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece512/Papers/sched.html
• http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~csandy/cs-323/09_dynamic_scheduling.html
• http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece512/Papers/Dwyer.1992.MICRO.pdf

Pizza out.