Advanced Topics in Data-Flow Computing

by Jean-Luc Gaudiot

Hardcover

Reviews

[Nick Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collected papers of the Eliat dataflow workshop held in conjunction with the 16th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (Jerusalem, 1989). What's up with the monospace reproduction -- hadn't we moved past that kind of thing by 1990? The freakin' TEXbooks had emerged complete by 1986, for Chrissakes. Anyway, you know whether or not such a collection would be useful to you. An excellent survey of dataflow architectures at 1990, but that value is limited by 1990 largely representing the end of dataflow research -- with the readvent of out-of-order, register-renaming μ-arch and rediscovery of Tomasulo's 1967 algorithm (read: the heavily-pipelined architectures originating in the P6 and epitomized in NetBurst (heralded in Willamette), especially the Prescott, which ran smack into the power wall and yielded up Banias and Penryn instead), modern processors are semi-dataflow machines already (the limitations of reorder buffers, instruction level parallelism and second-order stores place real boundaries on the performance of any such processor; see Chapter 3 of P&H's Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach in its fourth edition). Indeed, some of the Israelis at this workshop likely contributed to the Banias P4M μ-arch, but that's just speculation on my part.
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Amazon 2008-08-12, a true steal at $2.99!