This paper suggests a novel analytical model to predict average issue rate of both in-order and out-of-order issue policies. Most of previous works have employed only simulation methods to measure the instruction-level parallelism for performance. However these methods cannot disclose the cause of the performance bottle-neck. In this paper, the proposed model takes into account such factors as issue policy, instruction-level parallelism, branch probability, the accuracy of branch prediction, instruction window size, and the number of pipeline units to estimate the issue rate more accurately. To prove the correctness of the model, extensive simulations were performed with Intel 80386/80387 instruction traces. Simulation results showed that the proposed model can estimate the issue rate accurately within 3-10% differences. The analytical model and simulations show that the out-of-order issue can improve the superscalar performance by 70-206% compared to the in-order issue. The model employs parameters to characterize the behavior of programs and the structure of superscalar that cause performance bottle-neck. Thus, it can disclose the cause of the disproportion in performance and reduce the burden of excess simulations that should be performed whenever a new processor is designed.

The reorder buffer is usually employed to maintain the instruction execution in the correct order for a superscalar pipeline with out-of-order issue. In this paper, we propose a reorder buffer structure with shelter buffer for out-of-order issue superscalar processors not only to control stagnation efficiently, but also to reduce the buffer size. We can get remarkable performance improvement with only one or two buffers. Simulation results show that if the size of reorder buffer is between 8 and 32, performance gain obtained from the shelter is noticeable. For the shelter buffer of size 4, there is no performance improvement compared to that of size 2, which means that the shelter buffer of size 2 is large enough to handle most of the stagnation. If the shelter buffer of size 2 is employed, we can reduce the reorder buffer by 44% in Whetstone, 50% in FFT, 60% in FM, and 75% in Linpack benchmark program without loss of any throughput. Execution time is also improved by 19.78% in Whetstone, 19.67% in FFT, 23.93% in FM, and 8.65% in Linpack benchmark when the shelter buffer is used.