Colloquium

Date:Tuesday, November 7, 2000
Time:11:00 AM
Place:Gould-Simpson, Room 701
Organization: Alpha Development
Compaq


Refreshments will be served in the 7th-floor lobby of Gould-Simpson at 10:45 AM


Speakers


Srilatha "Bobbie" Manne

The Impact of Microarchitectural Decisions on Power


This talk uses the Alpha 21264 processor as a case study in discussing the impact microarchitectural decisions have on power issues. A architectural and power breakdown of the 21264 processor is given which shows the challenges designers face to achieve even small performance improvements. A 21264 is compared to the previous generation and next generation Alpha processors to show the future trends in the field.





Robert Muth

Spike: An Optimizer for Alpha Executables


Spike is a profile based optimizer for Alpha executables. It is currently shipping with the Compaq TRU64 Unix operating system. Among the transformations performed are code placement, memory prefetching, call optimization, and various peephole optimizations. Spike is routinely used to optimize the Unix kernel and huge executables such as the oracle database.

This talk describes the problems of optimizing executables at the post-link stage and the realizable performance gains.