Conclusion

All the aspects of microprocessor architecture presented in this article, and placed in their historical and technological context, show how architectural choices have evolved to take into account the changing constraints of cost, power consumption and increased performance to satisfy the ever-increasing number of new applications. The link with software is one of the most important aspects guaranteeing efficient processor usability. A major revolution is currently underway in both hardware and software: the development of parallelism as a solution to the quest for energy-efficient computing. Parallelism is appearing at many hardware levels (pipelining, multi/many cores, hyperthreading), but taking it into account at software level remains problematic. Solutions for certain applications are well mastered (massively parallel scientific computing, web servers and databases through virtualization...