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Number of register file ports in implementations
Author: Bigos Date: 2017-08-28 15:36
Agner wrote:
Hubert Lamontagne wrote:
On FPGAs, which I think would make sense for a test implementation, register files with lots of ports are an issue... especially with multiple write ports with no limitations on which registers are concurrently written to.


What do you think of an implementation like this:


There is a permanent register file, but no temporary register files. Temporary register values are stored instead in the instructions that need them in the reservation station. Each instruction has its register operands replaced by their values immediately after the decode stage if the values are available in the permanent register file. Register operands that are not yet available are replaced by the tag of the pending instruction that will produce the value. Each ALU has a write port that writes the result to all pending instructions that needs it, as well as to the permanent register file. ForwardCom does not allow instructions with more than one output value.


So we will need four or five register read ports in the early stage in the pipeline for reading the permanent register file, but no read ports for a huge temporary register file.


I think this is how most x86 architectures worked till Sandy Bridge on Intel side and Bobcat/Bulldozer on AMD side. Later they have switched to PRF-like architecture (Physical Register File) where data only moves where necessary and is not tied to the pipeline at the early stages. The reason for that was power - moving so much data (especially with 256-bit vectors introduced in Sandy Bridge) took a lot of it. There were also read ports issues on P6 architectures till Sandy Bridge that you mentioned in your microarchitecture paper which were probably fixed just because of that - meaning it was probably not scalable enough.


Vectors are implemented as follows. The pipeline is split into 64-bit lanes. Each lane has its own 64-bit register file, reservation station, pipeline, and 64-bit ALU. We can add as many 64-bit lanes as we need to support a certain vector length. There is one scheduler which controls all the lanes. This can run smoothly and fast as long as there is no exchange of data between the lanes. Instructions that move data between the lanes, such as broadcast and permute, are implemented in a separate unit with a single bidirectional data path to all the lanes. Such instructions will take one or two clock cycles extra, as they do in x86 processors.


Unless each vector pipeline uses the same register names for each part of the same bigger register, you would have to make these whole-register operations take N times as many sources (where N is the number of 64-bit pipelines), which would probably we an overkill for a scheduler.

Also, I don't see what would be the benefit of such a partitioning? Of course, some level of partitioning is needed (for example for power-gating unused data paths or separating some per-line units like adders), but that is physical (you could split it for each bit if you wanted); I don't think it would help the register files much - you still need as many read and write ports.


The in-order front end has its own ALU's which can handle simple integer instructions. Simple instructions on general purpose registers are executed here if their operands are available (as I have proposed in a previous post). Loop conters and simple branches will be executed in the front end so that the instructions of the loop body are sent to the out-of-order back end with the loop counter replaced by its value. This will reduce the branch misprediction penalty. Registers used for memory pointers and indexes will also mostly be resolved in the front end so that the memory operands can be fetched early.

Also, about the register file, the most problematic are the write ports. You can always double the number of read ports by duplicating the register file and having each write take place in both copies; the scaling is less than linear due to the writes being more complicated (have to drive more inputs), but is mostly fine. Minimizing the number of write ports is the most important thing.

You can also partition your register space into multiple classes, each of these having a different register file (Intel does it with the kN mask registers). This effectively resets your register file port count, unless you have to duplicate all of the ports in order to support all of the possible register data transfers at the same time. You can, for example, partition the scalar and vector registers into different files (like AMD does) in order to increase the maximum possible throughput if you use both scalar and vector instructions at the same time (Zen can handle up to 10 instructions partially thanks to that, though only for short bursts due to different bottlenecks elsewhere in the pipeline; Intel can only do 7, not counting the separate store port)

BTW, a similar partitioning scheme can be used for caches (the most obvious being I$ vs D$). For example, the Mill architecture has 2 different I$ partitions - one for instruction chunks going forward and another for the ones going backward. Each jump target is really a middle of code and each instruction is halved, with half going forward and half going backward. Since each instruction half will only ever go to a single cache, you effectively double the cache capacity without compromising the latency and complexity (just 2x area and power for having twice as much memory).

https://millcomputing.com/docs/encoding/

 
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