In this ISR the Proposal Instructions for the NICMOS Science Instrument are described. This report discusses the possible SI configurations, modes, and most of the optional parameters. The optional parameters which support the creation and association of patterns of exposures are discussed in a companion ISR (NICMOS-013).

The problem of extracting InstructionLevel Parallelism at levels of 10 instructionsper clock and higher is considered. Two different architectures which use speculation on memory accesses to achieve this level of performance are reviewed. It is pointed out that while this form of speculation gives high potential parallelism it is necessary to retain execution state so that incorrect speculation...

This paper proposes an enhanced method of multiple branch prediction using a per-primary branch history table. This scheme improves the previous ones based on a single global branch history register, by reducing interferences among histories of diierent branches caused by sharing a single register. This scheme also allows the prediction of a branch not to aaect the prediction of other branches ...

The paper begins by describing the evolving architecture of desktop PCs and the performance metrics of interest in evaluating them. It then describes some of the more interesting counters, references an earlier study using the counters, talks a little bit about the software to enable use of these counters, and describes typical values of instructions per cycle and other metrics of interest runn...