Intel Corporation

Edson Borin

Wei Liu

Youfeng Wu

Cheng C Wang

Shiliang Hu

Mauricio Breternitz, Jr

Craig B Zilles

Craig Buchanan Zilles

Shlomo Avni

Joao Paulo Porto

Cheng Wang

Mauricio Breternitz Jr

Nir Bone

Example methods and apparatus to facilitate dynamic core selection are disclosed. An example apparatus includes a first processor core of a first type; a second processor core of a second type different from the first type; and software to: access a user-supplied hint indicative of a user preference to execute program code on the first processor core, the user-supplied hint including a user-defined attribute of the program code; monitor performance of the program code on the first processor core; determine, based on the user-defined attribute of the program code, a predicted performance of the program code on the second processor core is better than the performance of the program code on the first processor core; and ignore the user preference by migrating the program code from the first processor core for execution on the second processor core.

Dynamic core selection for heterogeneous multi-core systems

Dynamically switching cores on a heterogeneous multi-core processing system may be performed by executing program code on a first processing core. Power up of a second processing core may be signaled. A first performance metric of the first processing core executing the program code may be collected. When the first performance metric is better than a previously determined core performance metric, power down of the second processing core may be signaled and execution of the program code may be continued on the first processing core. When the first performance metric is not better than the previously determined core performance metric, execution of the program code may be switched from the first processing core to the second processing core.

An apparatus and method is described herein for conditionally committing and/or speculative checkpointing transactions, which potentially results in dynamic resizing of transactions. During dynamic optimization of binary code, transactions are inserted to provide memory ordering safeguards, which enables a dynamic optimizer to more aggressively optimize code. And the conditional commit enables efficient execution of the dynamic optimization code, while attempting to prevent transactions from running out of hardware resources. While the speculative checkpoints enable quick and efficient recovery upon abort of a transaction. Processor hardware is adapted to support dynamic resizing of the transactions, such as including decoders that recognize a conditional commit instruction, a speculative checkpoint instruction, or both. And processor hardware is further adapted to perform operations to support conditional commit or speculative checkpointing in response to decoding such instructions.

Apparatus, method, and system for providing a decision mechanism for conditional commits in an atomic region

Example methods and apparatus to manage partial commit-checkpoints are disclosed. A disclosed example method includes identifying a commit instruction associated with a region of instructions executed by a processor, identifying candidate instructions from the region of instructions, and generating a processor partial commit-checkpoint to save a current state of the processor, the checkpoint based on calculated register values associated with live instructions, and including instruction reference addresses to link the candidate instructions.

Methods and apparatus to manage partial-commit checkpoints with fixup support

Methods and apparatus relating to compact trace trees for dynamic binary parallelization are described. In one embodiment, a compact trace tree (CTT) is generated to improve the effectiveness of dynamic binary parallelization. CTT may be used to determine which traces are to be duplicated and specialized for execution on separate processing elements. Other embodiments are also described and claimed.

Compact trace trees for dynamic binary parallelization

A method and apparatus for software-based control flow checking for soft error detection. In one embodiment, the method includes the instrumentation of one basic block of a target program to update a signature register with a successor basic block signature at an end of the basic block. In addition, the basic block is instrumented to verify that contents of the signature register match a basic block signature at a beginning of the basic block. In one embodiment, an instruction is inserted within the basic block to cause the signature register to store a predetermined value if the contents of the signature register match a basic block signature. In one embodiment, a basic block may be subdivided into a plurality of regions; each region is assigned a signature and instrumented to update the signature register at a beginning of each region. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Edson Borin