CPU Design · All levels
CPU Glossary
Shared vocabulary across ISA, microarchitecture, performance, and silicon closure.
Terms to use precisely
ROB: reorder buffer enforcing in-order architectural retirement.
Rename: remapping architectural registers to physical storage.
MPKI: misses or mispredicts per thousand instructions.
Top-down analysis: stage-loss decomposition for CPI attribution.
NUMA locality: ratio of local versus remote memory accesses.
Precise exception: architecturally correct fault model at commit boundary.