High Performance on a Chip

This chapter explains that killer micros are the high performance microprocessors that have emerged as the basis for both workstations and as nodes on multiprocessor machines. It discusses the process that makes a high performance chip. A machine instruction is a request to the central processing unit to perform some computation over a set of operands and deposit the result in either a register or back in memory. The collection of instructions for a specific processor is referred to as its instruction set. The operations that can be performed by instructions in an instruction set can be classified into four categories: (1) memory operations, (2) integer computations, (3) floating point computations, and (4) branch instructions. Many of the high performance microprocessors are based on reduced instruction set computer (RISC) technology. RISC is a technology based on simplification of the operation of a microprocessor. In a RISC processor, the instruction set is limited to a small number of necessary instructions.