Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In computer science a decoupled architecture is a processor with out-of-order execution that separates the fetch and decode stages from the execute stage in a pipelined processor by using a buffer. The buffer's purpose is to partition the memory access and execute functions in a co ...Full description
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In computer science a decoupled architecture is a processor with out-of-order execution that separates the fetch and decode stages from the execute stage in a pipelined processor by using a buffer. The buffer's purpose is to partition the memory access and execute functions in a computer program and achieve high-performance by exploiting the fine-grain parallelism between the two. In doing so it effectively hides all memory latency from the processor's perspective. A larger buffer can in theory increase throughput however if the processor has a branch misprediction then the entire buffer may need to be flushed wasting a lot of clock cycles and reducing the effectiveness. Furthermore larger buffers create more heat and use more die space. For this reason processor designers today favour a multi-threaded design approach.