10a What is the essential characteristic of the superscalar

10.a. What is the essential characteristic of the superscalar approach to processor design? b. What is the difference between the superscalar and superpipelined approaches?

Solution

Superscalar Approach:

Superscalar processor can execute multiple independent instructions in parallel. Within a single processor, it introduces a parallelism called \"Instruction-Level Parallelism\". Every processor has multiple execution units and this preprocessor dispatches multiple instructions to different execution units on the processor.

Difference between Superscalar and Superpipelined Approaches:

Superpipeline breaks the stages of a given pipeline into smaller stages. This is done by shortening the clock period for every instruction. Superpipeline is capable of performing 2 pipeline stages per clock cycle.

Superscalar doesn\'t decrease the clock cycle. Instead it depends on the processor\'s ability to execute multiple instructions in parallel. Superpipeline introduces a level of parallelism by increasing the number of instructions which can be in a pipeline.