What is Superscalar?

A processor design that issues and executes several instructions per clock cycle. It has multiple execution units and processes independent instructions in parallel.

Field: CPUs and architecture

Superscalar in the explanations

Questions that mention Superscalar (3)

  1. What is the processor design called that issues and executes multiple instructions simultaneously in one clock cycle?
  2. Approximately how many instructions per second can a processor with a 2 GHz clock and an average CPI (clocks per instruction) of 0.5 execute?
  3. Which metric indicates the number of instructions executed per clock?

Related terms

IPC Out-of-order execution Branch prediction Amdahl's law Cache coherency Cache memory DMA (direct memory access) DVFS (dynamic voltage and frequency scaling) GPU Instruction set architecture (ISA)

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