Intel Corporation

Sangwook Kim

Youfeng Wu

Mauricio Breternitz, Jr

Herbert H Hum

Jason W Brandt

Adi Yoaz

Robert T George

K S Venkatraman

Dhananjay Adhikari

An arrangement is provided for compressing microcode ROM ('uROM') in a processor and for efficiently accessing a compressed 'uROM'. A clustering-based approach may be used to effectively compress a uROM. The approach groups similar columns of microcode into different clusters and identifies unique patterns within each cluster. Only unique patterns identified in each cluster are stored in a pattern storage. Indices, which help map an address of a microcode word (&#x201c;uOP&#x201d;) to be fetched from a uROM to unique patterns required for the uOP, may be stored in an index storage. Typically it takes a longer time to fetch a uOP from a compressed uROM than from an uncompressed uROM. The compressed uROM may be so designed that the process of fetching a uOP (or uOPs) from a compressed uROM may be fully-pipelined to reduce the access latency.

Compressing and accessing a microcode ROM

In one embodiment of the present invention, a method includes invalidating an entry of a filter coupled to a pipeline resource if an update to the entry occurs during a first context; and flushing a portion of the pipeline resource corresponding to an address space including the entry.

Dynamically partitioning pipeline resources

According to one embodiment a computer system is disclosed. The computer system includes a microprocessor and a chipset coupled to the microprocessor. The microprocessor removes stale branch instructions prior to the execution of a first cache line by finding existing branch prediction data for the first cache line.

Reconfigurable trace cache

In one embodiment, the present invention includes a method to compress data stored in a memory to reduce size and power consumption. The method includes segmenting each word of a code portion into multiple fields, forming tables having unique entries for each of the fields, and assigning a pointer to each of the unique entries in each of the tables. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

Growing community of inventors

Austin, TX, United States of America

Sangwook Kim