Memory Decoupled Architectures and related issues Guest Editor’s Introduction

It is my great pleasure to serve as guest editor for this special issue of TCCA Newsletter, which is hosting eight papers from the MEDEA (MEmory DEcoupled Architectures) Workshop, jointly held with PACT-2000 conference. The rationale behind this workshop was to revive the original idea of Memory Access Decoupling, presented in the famous paper of Jim Smith, “Decoupled Access/Execute Architectures” [1]. In that paper a novel architecture was proposed, as emerging among high performance architectures appearing in the industrial scenario (CDC Cyber 180/990, CSPI array processor) and the academy (Illinois SMA). At that time, Jim Smith came back to the University of Wisconsin to fuel his ideas. The main concept in Memory Access Decoupling was to use two instruction streams and queues to separate memory accesses and pure computations [2].