Towards the Improving Branch Instructions Identification in High- Performance Processors: Issues, Challenges and Techniques

Introduction: Accurate branch prediction technique has become compulsory in the superscalar and deep pipeline processors. The conditional instructions can break the continuous flow of execution in the pipeline stages, thereby decreasing processor performance. Discussion: This paper highlights the concept of branch prediction, some issues and challenges, and techniques for improving processor performance. Further, this paper also presents the role of branch prediction in different processors and their features. Conclusion: The concept of the branch prediction used in parallel processors to enhance the execution speed of the conditional branch instructions and improve the processor's performance is highlighted in this paper. Further, this paper highlights the branch predictor techniques with their features and presents the challenges, issues, and future techniques related to the branch prediction.

Structuring ENIAC

This chapter explores the development of ENIAC’s overall architecture and control method. This was shaped, to a degree that has not previously been recognized, by an early and very detailed exploration led by Arthur W. Burks of how the machine could be “set up” to calculate shell trajectories, the task for which it was commissioned. Programming ENIAC was not, as has often been asserted, an “afterthought” to its design and construction. Discussion is focused in particular on the development of its master programmer unit, used to control sets of nested loops. Although it is widely believed that the ability to change the course of a computation based on results so far obtained (later be conceptualized as a conditional branch) was added to ENIAC late in its development, we show that this capability was planned for early on and that its eventual implementation as a capability of the master programmer reflected a distinct approach to the structuring of automatic computation shaped by the team’s work on the trajectory computation problem.