Microarchitecture of the 80960 high-integration processors

The 80960 is Intel Corporation´s newest microprocessor and serves as the first implementation of a novel architecture family. Design goals of the processor and architecture were to maintain a constant cost/benefit ratio in the entire design while identifying and minimization bottlenecks in an overall system architecture. This has resulted in an architecture suited to future proliferation as well as a first implementation with high functionality and good performance. The authors describe the microarchitecture of the 80960 processor and the tradeoffs made in its development to meet the design goals. Features discussed include the instruction decode and sequencing, the integer execution unit, the floating-point execution unit, and the translation lookaside buffer