Internal organization of the Alpha 21164, a 300-MHz 64-bit quad-issue CMOS RISC microprocessor

A new CMOS microprocessor, the Alpha 21164, reaches 1,200 mips/600 MFLOPS (peak performance). This new implementation of the Alpha architecture achieves SPECint92/SPECfp92 performance of 345/505 (estimated). At these performance levels, the Alpha 21164 has delivered the highest performance of any commercially available microprocessor in the world as of January 1995. It contains a quad-issue, superscalar instruction unit; two 64-bit integer execution pipelines; two 64-bit floating-point execution pipelines; and a high-performance memory subsystem with multiprocessor-coherent write-back caches. OVERVIEW OF THE ALPHA 21164 The Alpha 21164 microprocessor is now a product of Digital Semiconductor. The chip is the second completely new microprocessor to implement the Alpha instruction set