Architecture Question:

What are superscalar machines and VLIW machines?

Architecture Interview Question
Architecture Interview Question

Answer:

As superscalar machines become more complex, the difficulties of scheduling instruction issue become more complex. Another way of looking at superscalar machines is as dynamic instruction schedulers - the hardware decides on the fly which instructions to execute in parallel, out of order, etc.

An alternative approach would be to get the compiler to do it beforehand - that is, to statically schedule execution. This is the basic concept behind Very Long Instruction Word, or VLIW machines.


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