Apple Inc.

Boris S Alvarez-Heredia

Aditya Kesiraju

Andrew J Beaumont-Smith

Srikanth Balasubramanian

Ran A Chachick

Pradeep Kanapathipillai

Daniel U Becker

Venkatram Krishnaswamy

Edvin Catovic

In an embodiment, a coprocessor may include a bypass indication which identifies execution circuitry that is not used by a given processor instruction, and thus may be bypassed. The corresponding circuitry may be disabled during execution, preventing evaluation when the output of the circuitry will not be used for the instruction. In another embodiment, the coprocessor may implement a grid of processing elements in rows and columns, where a given coprocessor instruction may specify an operation that causes up to all of the processing elements to operate on vectors of input operands to produce results. Implementations of the coprocessor may implement a portion of the processing elements. The coprocessor control circuitry may be designed to operate with the full grid or partial grid, reissuing instructions in the partial grid case to perform the requested operation. In still another embodiment, the coprocessor may be able to fuse vector mode operations.

Coprocessors with bypass optimization, variable grid architecture, and fused vector operations

In an embodiment, a power control circuit for an execute circuit is configured to monitor power consumption of operations in a pipeline of the execute circuit and potential changes in power consumption if new operations are issued into the pipeline. The power control circuit may be configured to inhibit issuance of a given operation if the change in power consumption is greater than a maximum increase. A decaying average of previous power consumptions may be maintained and compared to the potential increase in power consumption to control the rate of change in power consumption over time.

Operation processing controlled according to difference in current consumption

Embodiments of a multiplier unit that may be used for division and square root operations are disclosed. The embodiments may provide a reduced and fixed latency for denormalization and rounding used in the division and square root operations. A storage circuit may be configured to receive first and second source operands. A multiplier circuit may be configured to perform a plurality of multiplication operations dependent upon the first and second source operands. Each result after an initial result of the multiplier may also depend on at least one previous result. Circuitry may be configured to perform a shift operation and a rounding operation on a given result of the plurality of results. An error of the given result may be less than a predetermined threshold value.

Multiplier unit with speculative rounding for use with division and square-root operations

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Redwood City, CA, United States of America

Boris S Alvarez-Heredia