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yeq
  • Multi-core parallelism
    • It exploits multiple parallel cores and needs to replicate all the instructions.
    • It relies on software (pThread, for example) to create threads.
  • SIMD parallelism.
    • It uses multiple ALUs to process the same instruction stream.
    • It happens in core and is the most efficient one that provides high throughput.
    • It is heavily used in graphics and complicated machine learning tasks.
  • Superscalar parallelism.
    • It depends on the hardware to automatically find out some instructions with no dependency of others in a single instruction stream that could be executed at the same time.
RomanArena

Also in the Assignment 1 we can see that several forms can be combined together to improve the performance, like SIMD and multi-core,which takes advantage of both vectorization and multi-core processing.

pk267

Q: What is the difference between Pipelining and Superscalar execution? Both of them seem to execute more than 1 instruction in any given clock cycle.

A: Dividing an instruction into 5 steps: IF, ID, EX, MEM and WB (notation from Patterson book) and executing one phase in each cycle is Pipelining. At any given clock cycle, more than 1 instruction is in the pipeline. But in each stage, there is just one instruction.

In Superscalar execution, there is more than 1 instruction in the, say, IF unit itself.

So, Pipelining would be something like: IF\n \t ID \t\t EX \t\t\t MEM \t\t\t\t WB Then, superscalar will be: IF\n IF\n \t ID \t ID . . . and so on.