Modern Microprocessors – A 90-Minute Guide
Summary
Modern Microprocessors – A 90-Minute Guide offers a compact, brisk overview of how contemporary CPUs balance pipeline depth, instruction-level and thread-level parallelism, and memory hierarchies. It covers core concepts such as pipelining, superscalar and VLIW designs, branch prediction, predication, OOO vs compiler scheduling, and the memory wall, with historical context and examples across architectures. The article also discusses trends like SMT, multi-core, SIMD, and packaging innovations such as chiplets and SoCs.