Isn't this what modern CPUs are effectively doing with out-of-order execution and pipelining?
Seems like this paper may have been an important precursor to that line of thinking.
Seems like this paper may have been an important precursor to that line of thinking.
In the late 1980s it was a common belief that the limit of single-core CPU performance was very near. So there was intense research into multi-core systems, the holy grail was to find a way to efficiently execute ordinary sequential programs. That was what this paper was trying to achieve: "While we currently believe that this work will lead to an architecture which can achieve factors of 10-100 times the performance of uniprocessors on unmodified Lisp programs, we have no proof, even in simulation".
On that note: I read The Soul of a New Machine a while ago, which is about a team of engineers designing a computer with a new architecture at the end of the 70s, and while it didn't go into the specifics of how the CPU was implemented it mentioned features such as different layers of cache between the CPU and the RAM, out-of-order execution, instruction prefetching and branch prediction. You'd be surprised at how many things in computers have already been around since the 60s.