With advances in VLSI technology, microprocessor designers can provide more microarchitectural parallelism to increase performance. We have identified four major forms of such parallelism: multiple microoperations issued per cycle, multiple result distribution buses, multiple execution units, and pipelined execution units. The experiments reported in this paper address two important issues: The effects of these forms and the appropriate balance among them. A central microarchitecture is identified as the comparison basis. We separately vary each form of the microarchitectural parallelism in the central to measure their individual effects on performance. In addition, we vary two forms of the microarchitectural parallelism in the central to derive an appropriate balance between them. To make fair comparisons, our compiler generates different code sequences optimized for different microarchitectural configurations. For each given set of technology constraints, these experiments can be used to derive a cost-effective microarchitecture to execute each given set of workload programs at high speed.