Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter presents several challenges that architectures are facing these days, such as the imminent end of the Moore’s law as it is known today; the usage of future technologies that will replace silicon; the stagnation of ILP increase in superscalar processors and their excessive power consumption and, most importantly, how the aforementioned aspects are impacting on the development of new architectural alternatives. All these aspects point to the fact that new architectural solutions are necessary. Then, the main reasons that motivated the writing of this book are shown. Several aspects are discussed, as the why ILP does not increase as before; the use of both combinational logic and reconfigurable fabric to speedup execution of data dependent instructions; the importance of maintaining binary compatibility, which is the possibility of reusing previously compiled code without any kind of modification; yield issues and the costs of fabrication. This chapter ends with a brief review of what will be seen in the rest of the book.