During the last 5 years, thanks to huge progress in IC technology, microprocessor architecture has made condiderable progress. More recently, the thermal wall (limiting the increase in frequency) has put more focus on microprocessor architecture pushing ahead multicore. In this lecture we will review most of recent progress in microprocessor architecture (out of order execution, superscalar, vector extensions, multi/hyperthreading, multilevel caches, multicore). The emphasis will be set on the impact of these new features on programming and performance tuning.

William Jalby, LRC IT@CA, CEA/DAM et université de Versailles-Saint Quentin