Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium

4:15PM, Wednesday, March 29
NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03

The MAJC Processor Architecture

Marc Tremblay
Distinguished Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
The MAJC (pronounced "magic") processor architecture was created based on the assumption that Java will be the dominant platform for internet/ intranet computing in enterprise and consumer markets. The architecture was therefore derived based on a broad set of applications representative of current and future workloads. These differ dramatically from the benchmarks used in the 70's and 80's for defining CISC and RISC processors. For instance, MAJC focuses on "throughput computing" where the throughput of multiple applications is as important as (if not more important than) the latency of a single application. Examples of target applications are multi-threaded Java and C++ applications found on Webservers, Mail servers, Application servers, thin clients, etc.

Also, digital data types and their associated operations, needed for the handling of digital communication, or for encryption (secure servers, VPN, and e-commerce transactions), or for compression of digital contents, or for processing digitized analog signals, are given as much importance in MAJC as traditional data types (integer and float), and traditional operations (add and subtract). Functional units therefore operate on "data" much like methods operate on object fields, almost irrespective of data types.

High Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP) is reached by issuing multiple instructions per cycle (VLIW ISA) that operate on operands originating from a large unified register file. ILP also gets a boost from traditional techniques such as predication, speculation, branch filtering, load positioning, etc. More importantly, support for higher levels of parallelism, namely thread-level parallelism (TLP) is provided. TLP and Space Time Computing, a form of speculative multi- threading, drove many architecture decisions and their impact is reflected in the ISA and in the micro-architecture of the first MAJC processor.

Besides covering the MAJC architecture, details will be given during the talk of the MAJC-5200, a VLIW Multi-Processor System-On-a-Chip with support for Space Time Computing.

About the speaker:

Marc Tremblay is a Distinguished Engineer leading some of the high- performance microprocessor research and development at Sun Microsystems. As the Chief Architect of the MAJC program, he is responsible for the creation and implementation a new family of microprocessors tailored to the Java computing environment, to processing new-media applications, and to addressing Service Provider application throughput. Prior to his current responsibilities, he was an architect for Sun's UltraSPARC I and II microprocessors. He also started and was architect of the picoJava processor core.

Marc holds a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and a B.S. in Physics Engineering from Laval University in Canada. He holds 17 patents and has 60 more outstanding in various areas of computer architecture. He is the Co-Chair of the Hot Chips 2000 Conference.

Contact information:

www.sun.com/microelectronics/MAJC