WM

People | Publications

Description

WM is a family of architectures that achieve significantly greater performance than RISC designs -- often by a factor of four or more. WM is a superscalar architecture; that is, it achieves its performance by executing more than one instruction concurrently. Unlike other superscalar designs, WM ameliorates the common problems encountered in achieving sustained concurrent execution of instructions by unusual approaches to the semantics of its basic instruction set. The resulting charms of the design are the simplicity of the mechanisms used and the synergy of their interaction; its modest demands on compiler technology; its broad spectrum of applicability; and, most of all, the fact that the complexity of an implementation is comparable to that of RISC machines.

WM is a family of architectures in the sense that it is parameterized by the size (width) of the arithmetic operations supported by a member of the family. WM supports integer arithmetic of width n-bits and floating point arithmetic of width m-bits directly in hardware. Thus, for example, WM<16,0> is a 16-bit (integer only) microcomputer, while WM<64,64> is likely to be a high performance machine with a large 64-bit virtual address space and 64-bit floating point arithmetic.

The WM Team (it evolved a lot over time)

Principal Architects

Other Faculty

Researchers & Students

  • Lee Belfore
  • Ricky Benitez
  • Scott Briercheck
  • Saad Himmich
  • Peter Kester
  • Steve McCalla
  • Sally McKee
  • Sunil Pamidi
  • Ramesh Peri
  • Max Salinas
  • Tom Schneider
  • Andy Schwab
  • Tim Sigmon
  • Rohit Wad
  • Pat Widener

Publications

We're still working on gather all of the various WM papers. Unfortunately, most of the reports are not available electronically. If you would like to obtain a hardcopy of any of these, send mail to gregg@virginia.edu. We are making postscript versions of preliminary drafts available via ftp where possible, in the hopes that this might help you decide whether you want to bother with hardcopies.


Computer Architecture | Computer Science | Electrical Engineering

comments to Sally McKee, mckee@virginia.edu