The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 21, 1998
Filed:
Jul. 24, 1996
Tse-Yu Yeh, Milpitas, CA (US);
Mircea Poplingher, Campbell, CA (US);
Kent G Fielden, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Hans Mulder, San Francisco, CA (US);
Rajiv Gupta, Los Altos, CA (US);
Dale Morris, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Michael Schlansker, Los Altos, CA (US);
Institute for the Development of Emerging Architectures, L.L.C., Cupertino, CA (US);
Abstract
A processor and method that reduces instruction fetch penalty in the execution of a program sequence of instructions comprises a branch predict instruction that is inserted into the program at a location which precedes the branch. The branch predict instruction has an opcode that specifies a branch as likely to be taken or not taken, and which also specifies a target address of the branch. A block of target instructions, starting at the target address, is prefetched into the instruction cache of the processor so that the instructions are available for execution prior to the point in the program where the branch is encountered. Also specified by the opcode is an indication of the size of the block of target instructions, and a trace vector of a path in the program sequence that leads to the target from the branch predict instruction for better utilization of limited memory bandwidth.