Analysis of Dispatch Sequences on Modern Processor Architectures

Dispatch cost is intimately coupled with processor implementation. The same dispatch sequence may have different cost on different processor implementations, even if all of them implement the same architecture (e.g., the SPARC instruction set). In particular, processor pipelining and superscalar execution make it impossible to use the number of instructions in a code sequence as an accurate performance indicator. This section characterizes the run-time performance of dispatch mechanisms on modern pipelined processors by determining the performance impact of branch latency and superscalar instruction issue. We do this by analyzing call code sequences, optimally scheduled for the given instruction issue. In addition to providing specific numbers for three example architectures, our analysis allows bounds on dispatch performance to be computed for a wide range of possible (future) processors. With the rapid change in processor design, it is desirable to characterize performance in a way that makes the dependence on certain processor characteristics explicit, so that performance on a new processor can be estimated accurately as long as the processor’s characteristics are known.