This talk traces the development of the different types of instruction-level parallelism that have been incorporated into the hardware of processors from the early 1960s to the present day. We will see how the use of parallel function units in the CDC 6600 eventually led to the design of the Cray-1 with its vector processing instructions and superscalar processors such as the Alpha. The talk also covers Very Long Instruction Word systems and SIMD systems. The talk is accompanied by visual demonstrations of the activities that occur within processors using simulation models developed using the HASE computer architecture simulation environment.

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• Slides - Talk slides