Grant Griffin is president of Iowegian International. He has been a DSP hardware and software designer for more than 14 years and is the author of Iowegian's ScopeDSP and ScopeFIR DSP software-development tools. Too Using the advanced architecture of a Pentium II is a double-edged sword. Its superscalar architecture lets it execute instructions very quickly, but makes predicting execution speed almost impossible. To understand this uncertainty, consider how the Pentium II CPU executes its instructions.
Modern microprocessors achieve higher speed by implementing pipelined architectures.
The Pentium II further enhances its performance as a superscalar processor by implementing what Intel calls dynamic execution, which minimizes the number of times the CPU can't process a new instruction until the current instruction is completed. This dynamic instruction scheduling scheme means bad news for engineers because it makes the speed of test-program execution almost impossible to predict. It's difficult to predict execution times when the Pentium must process interrupts and share its resources with various background processes. Of course, different versions of the Pentium CPU have different code-execution speeds due to different clock rates, cache memory sizes, and different memory access times. Cahners Business Information , a division of Reed Elsevier .