Kunle Olukotun didn't like systems that wasted their time stalled on loads and branches. He and his team at Afara Websystems therefor designed a non-speculating processor that did work without waits. It became the Sun T1.
The basic idea is to have more decoders than ALUs, so you can have lots of threads competing for an ALU. If, for example, thread 0 comes to a load, it will stall, so on the next instruction thread 1 gets the ALU, and runs... until it stalls and thread 2 get the ALU. Ditto for thread 3, and control goes back to thread 0, which has completed a multi-cycle fetch from cache and is ready to proceed once more.
That is the basic idea of the Sun T-series processors.
The strength is that the ALUs are never waiting for work. The weakness is that individual threads still have to wait for data to come from cache.
Now imagine it isn't entire ALUs that are the available resources, its individual ALU component, like adders. Now the scenario becomes
... and so on. Each cycle, the hardware assigns as many ALU components as it has available to threads, all of which can run. Only the stalled threads are waiting, and they don't need ALU bits to do that.
Now more threads can run at the same time, the ALU components are
(probabilistically) all busy, and we have increased capacity. But
individual threads are still waiting for cache...
In principle, we could allocate two adders to thread 5, one doing the current instruction and another doing a subsequent, non-dependent instruction. It's not speculative, but it is out-of-order. That makes some threads twice as fast when doing non-interacting calculations. Allocate it three adders and it's three times as fast.
If we're prepared to have more ALU components than decoders, decode deeply and we have enough of each to be likely to be able to find lots of non-dependent instructions, then we can be executing multiple instructions at once in multiple streams, and probabilistically get startlingly better performance.
I can see a new kind of optimizing compiler, too: one which tries to group non-dependent instructions together.
Is this what happens in a T5? That's a question for a hardware developer: I have no idea... yet
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunle_Olukotun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afara_Websystems
https://web.archive.org/web/20110720050850/http://www-hydra.stanford.edu/~kunle/
-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain