A scalable instruction queue design using dependence chains

Increasing the number of instruction queue (IQ) entries in a dynamically scheduled processor exposes more instruction-level parallelism, leading to higher performance. However, increasing a conventional IQ's physical size leads to larger latencies and slower clock speeds. We introduce a new IQ design that divides a large queue into small segments, which can be clocked at high frequencies. We use dynamic dependence-based scheduling to promote instructions from segment to segment until they reach a small issue buffer. Our segmented IQ is designed specifically to accommodate variable-latency instructions such as loads. Despite its roughly similar circuit complexity; simulation results indicate that our segmented instruction queue with 512 entries and 128 chains improves performance by up to 69% over a 32-entry conventional instruction queue for SpecINT 2000 benchmarks, and up to 398% for SpecFP 2000 benchmarks. The segmented IQ achieves from 55% to 98% of the performance of a monolithic 512-entry queue while providing the potential for much higher clock speeds.