Digital Equipment Corporation

R Iris Bahar

Richard Lee Sites

Derrick R Meyer

Nicholas D Wade

Raymond L Strouble

Douglas E Sanders

Rebecca L Stamm

Michael A Callander

Linda Chao

A pipelined CPU executing instructions of variable length, and referencing memory using various data widths. Macroinstruction pipelining is employed (instead of microinstruction pipelining), with queueing between units of the CPU to allow flexibility in instruction execution times. A wide bandwidth is available for memory access; fetching 64-bit data blocks on each cycle. A hierarchical cache arrangement has an improved method of cache set selection, increasing the likelihood of a cache hit. A writeback cache is used (instead of writethrough) and writeback is allowed to proceed even though other accesses are suppressed due to queues being full. A branch prediction method employs a branch history table which records the taken vs. not-taken history of branch opcodes recently used, and uses an empirical algorithm to predict which way the next occurrence of this branch will go, based upon the history table. A floating point processor function is integrated on-chip, with enhanced speed due to a bypass technique; a trial mini-rounding is done on low-order bits of the result, and if correct, the last stage of the floating point processor can be bypassed, saving one cycle of latency. For CAL type instructions, a method for determining which registers need to be saved is executed in a minimum number of cycles, examining groups of register mask bits at one time. Internal processor registers are accessed with short (byte width) addresses instead of full physical addresses as used for memory and I/O references, but off-chip processor registers are memory-mapped and accessed by the same busses using the same controls as the memory and I/O. In a non-recoverable error detected by ECC circuits in the cache, an error transition mode is entered wherein the cache operates under limited access rules, allowing a maximum of access by the system for data blocks owned by the cache, but yet minimizing changes to the cache data so that diagnostics may be run. Separate queues are provided for the return data from memory and cache invalidates, yet the order or bus transactions is maintained by a pointer arrangement. The bus protocol used by the CPU to communicate with the system bus is of the pended type, with transactions on the bus identified by an ID field specifying the originator, and arbitration for bus grant goes one simultaneously with address/data transactions on the bus.

Error transition mode for multi-processor system

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Belmont, MA, United States of America

R Iris Bahar