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Greatest trend in VLSI generation is increase in parallelism
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Up to 1985: bit level parallelism: 4-bit -> 8 bit -> 16-bit
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slows after 32 bit
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adoption of 64-bit now under way, 128-bit far (not performance issue)
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important inflection point when 32-bit microprocessor and cache fit on a chip
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Mid 80s to mid 90s: instruction level parallelism
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pipelining and simple instruction sets, + compiler advances (RISC)
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on-chip caches and functional units => superscalar execution
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greater sophistication: out of order execution, speculation, prediction
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to deal with control transfer and latency problems
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Next step: thread level parallelism
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