A taxonomy of out-of-order instruction commit

Abstract

While in-order instruction commit has its advantages, such as providing precise interrupts and avoiding complications with the memory consistency model, it requires the core to hold on to resources (reorder buffer entries, load/store queue entries, registers) until they are released in program order. In contrast, out-of-order commit releases resources much earlier, yielding improved performance without the need for additional hardware resources. In this paper, we revisit out-of-order commit from a different perspective, not by proposing another hardware technique, but by introducing a taxonomy and evaluating three different micro-architectures that have this technique enabled. We show how smaller processors can benefit from simple out-oforder commit strategies, but that larger, aggressive cores require more aggressive strategies to improve performance.