Title :
Virtual memory in contemporary microprocessors
Author :
Jacob, Bruce ; Mudge, Trevor
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Maryland Univ., College Park, MD, USA
Abstract :
Here, we consider the memory management designs of a sampling of six recent processors, focusing primarily on their architectural differences, and hint at optimizations that someone designing or porting system software might want to consider. We selected examples from the most popular commercial microarchitectures: the MIPS R10000, Alpha 21164, PowerPC 604, PA-8000, UltraSPARC-I, and Pentium II. This survey describes how each processor architecture supports the common features of virtual memory: address space protection, shared memory, and large address spaces
Keywords :
computer architecture; microprocessor chips; storage management; virtual storage; Alpha 21164; MIPS R10000; PA-8000; Pentium II; PowerPC 604; UltraSPARC-I; memory management; microarchitectures; virtual memory; Clocks; Hardware; Memory management; Microarchitecture; Microprocessors; Physics computing; Pipelines; Power system management; Protection; Resource management;
Journal_Title :
Micro, IEEE
