Microprocessor employs mainframe performance design techniques

Abstract

During the infancy of integrated circuit technology, designers still grappled with the problem of getting enough transistors on a reasonably sized die to enable them to design more than fundamental types of logic chips. Little more than a decade later, designers no longer are faced with that problem. On the contrary, with the hundred thousand and more transistors that can now be economically integrated, their task becomes one of deciding whether to add ancilliary functions on the same die as a microprocessor, or to use these transistors to embellish and speed up the microprocessor's activities.