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Memory Level Parallelism




referring to the ability to have pending multiple memory operations, in particular Cache misses,
at the same time.

MLP may be considered a form of ILP, Instruction Level Parallelism .
However, ILP is often mixed up with Superscalar ,
the ability to execute more than one instruction at the same time.
E.g. a processor such as the Intel Pentium Pro is 5-way superscalar,
with the ability to start executing 5 different microinstructions in a given cycle,
but it can handle 4 different cache misses for up to 20 different load microinstructions
at any time.

It is possible to have a machine that is not superscalar
but which nevertheless has high MLP.


REFERENCES


"Microarchitecture optimizations for exploiting memory-level parallelism",
Yuan Chou, B. Fahs, and S. Abraham,
Computer Architecture, 2004. Proceedings. 31st Annual International Symposium on
2004.

"Coming challenges in microarchitecture and architecture"
Ronen, R.; Mendelson, A.; Lai, K.; Shih-Lien Lu; Pollack, F.; Shen, J.P.
Proceedings of the IEEE
Volume: 89 Issue: 3 Mar 2001

MLP yes! ILP no! , Andrew Glew