--- name: micro-writing-style description: Use when drafting or revising a MICRO paper's prose and structure — building the characterization-motivated introduction, budgeting 11 appendix-free pages, drawing the mechanism walkthrough a microarchitect can re-implement, and pairing every speedup claim with its area, storage, and power cost line. --- # MICRO Writing Style A MICRO paper is an engineering argument: *this pattern exists in real workloads, here is a piece of hardware that exploits it, here is what it costs, here is what it pays*. The style rules below encode how the microarchitecture community reads. ## The four-beat argument 1. **Characterization beat.** Open with measured evidence that the exploitable behavior exists — a miss-pattern histogram, a stall-cycle breakdown, a reuse-distance CDF — from real workloads, before any mechanism appears. MICRO reviewers trust a paper that observed the machine before modifying it. 2. **Insight beat.** One sentence naming the property your hardware will exploit ("dead blocks announce themselves by burst-then-silence access"). If the insight sentence could headline three different mechanisms, sharpen it. 3. **Mechanism beat.** A block diagram plus a walkthrough at the level of tables, counters, comparators, and state machines — detailed enough that a reader could size the SRAM. Include the *storage budget table* (bits per entry × entries). 4. **Accounting beat.** Speedup is half a result. The other half: area or storage overhead, power, added latency on the critical path, and what happens on the workloads the mechanism does not help (the tax on non-beneficiaries). ## Page budget for 11 content pages, no appendix The 2026 guidelines permit no appendix, so the body must be self-sufficient — proofs of concept, sensitivity sweeps, and methodology detail all compete for the same 11 pages (references are unlimited and free). | Section | Pages | Non-negotiable content | |---|---|---| | Intro + characterization | 2.0 | Motivating data figure by page 2 | | Background / threat model | 1.0 | Only what the mechanism needs | | Mechanism | 2.5 | Block diagram, walkthrough, storage table | | Methodology | 1.0 | Simulator, configs, workloads, power model — exact versions | | Evaluation | 3.0 | Headline result, ablations, sensitivity, overhead accounting | | Related work + conclusion | 1.5 | Deltas against nearest mechanisms | Squeezing tricks (`\vspace`, tightened lists, sub-9pt figure text) are barred by the guidelines and checked visually — recover space by cutting content, not leading. ## Sentence-level calibration - Tie every performance number to its instrument: "8.4% geomean speedup on SPEC CPU2017 rate-1 **in cycle-level simulation**" — never let a simulated number read as a silicon number. - Prefer mechanism verbs (filters, throttles, bypasses, coalesces) over marketing verbs (unlocks, revolutionizes, dramatically improves). - State the baseline aggressively and early: "against an 8-way OoO core with a state-of-the-art stride+SMS prefetcher" beats "against a baseline core." - Quantify the negative space: which workload class regresses, by how much, and why the mechanism's guard logic bounds it. ## Figure discipline ```text Fig. 1 motivating characterization (the "why" figure) — page 1-2 Fig. 2 mechanism block diagram (the "what" figure) — mechanism section Fig. 3 headline bar chart, geomean marked, baseline = 1 — first evaluation page Fig. 4+ ablation / sensitivity, one question per figure Every figure: axis labels >= 9pt after scaling; caption states config + workload set. ``` A MICRO reader flips to Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 before reading a word — both must stand alone with their captions. ## Naming and terminology conventions - **Name the mechanism once, early, and use the name relentlessly.** MICRO papers are remembered by mechanism name (UCP, McPAT, DaDianNao); a design referred to as "our approach" for eleven pages has no handle for reviewers to discuss it by. - Keep the community's units: IPC and speedup for performance, MPKI for misses/branch events, KB/mm² for cost, nJ/pJ per access for energy. Converting a miss-rate percentage where the reader expects MPKI adds friction. - "Baseline" means the unmodified reference machine; "prior work" means the best published competitor — never blur the two in prose or legends. - Threat-model vocabulary (for security mechanisms): attacker capability, channel, and what is explicitly out of scope, stated before the mechanism, not after. ## Title and abstract conventions The title should carry the mechanism name plus the structure touched ("Ghostline: Demand-Triggered Dead-Block Reclamation for Shared LLCs") — searchable by the structure, memorable by the name. The abstract executes the four beats in miniature, each beat with a number attached; see `resources/worked-examples/01-introduction.md` for a full before → after. ## Anti-patterns the PC flags - Characterization-free introductions that open with "Moore's law" boilerplate. - Mechanisms described only in prose, with no sizeable structure — unimplementable. - Evaluation sections that tour benchmarks instead of answering ordered questions. - Overhead numbers missing, or buried in a sentence instead of a table row. - IPC arithmetic averaged instead of geomean'd, or speedup over an unnamed baseline. - "Details omitted due to space" — with no appendix allowed, that reads as "details do not exist." ## Revision passes, in order 1. **Argument pass** — do the four beats appear, in order, with a number each? 2. **Claim-audit pass** — every performance sentence checked for instrument label, baseline name, and metric correctness (geomean, MPKI). 3. **Skeptic pass** — a co-author plays the methodology-forensics reviewer (`micro-review-process`) and attacks configs, sampling, and baselines; fix in text what they had to ask about. 4. **Compression pass** — apply `micro-supplementary` triage until the body sits at 11 pages without squeezing tricks. 5. **Format pass** — the `micro-submission` gate table, on paper, by eye. ## Output format ```text [Argument beats] characterization / insight / mechanism / accounting: present-missing each [Insight sentence] [Storage budget table] present at bit-level: yes / no [Cost line] area-storage-power-latency all quantified: yes / partial / no [Page budget] section over/under vs table above [Figure audit] Fig1 motivates / Fig2 rebuildable / Fig3 geomean+baseline: pass-fail [Calibration issues] ```