Intel Corporation

Pasquale Cocchini

Carlos V Rozas

Francis McKeen

Meltem Ozsoy

Matthew Fernandez

An apparatus and method for tracking speculative execution flow and detecting potential vulnerabilities. For example, one embodiment of a processor comprises: an instruction fetcher to fetch instructions from a cache or system memory; a branch predictor to speculate a first instruction path to be taken comprising a first sequence of instructions; a decoder to decode the first sequence of instructions; execution circuitry to execute the first sequence of instructions and process data associated with the instruction to generate results; information flow tracking circuitry and/or logic to: assign labels to all or a plurality of instructions in the first sequence of instructions, track resource usage of the plurality of instructions using the labels, merge sets of labels to remove redundancies; and responsive to detecting that the first instruction path was mis-predicted, generating one or more summaries comprising resources affected by one or more of the first sequence of instructions; and recycling labels responsive to retirement of instructions associated with the labels.

Apparatus and method for speculative execution information flow tracking

A method and apparatus to obtain minimum cycle latency and maximum required time at a driver for an assignment of clocked and non-clocked repeaters in a topology comprising, determining whether a node in the topology is a leaf, and assigning covers if the node is a leaf. Determining whether the node in the topology comprises one branch or two branches. Assigning covers to each node and eliminating inferior covers. Merging covers, and deleting inferior covers taking into account a difference in interconnect latency associated with the covers. The above method may be modified with a heuristic to insert repeaters in a topology for a given latency at each driver-receiver pair.

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Hillsboro, OR, United States of America

Pasquale Cocchini