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:
Mar. 16, 1999
Filed:
Jun. 18, 1997
Rammohan Narayan, Austin, TX (US);
Rupaka Mahalingaiah, Austin, TX (US);
Paul K Miller, Austin, TX (US);
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Abstract
A method of instruction dispatch is provided in which a directly-decoded instruction and a microcode instruction are concurrently dispatched ('packed'). The instruction which is second in program order is retained until the succeeding clock cycle. During the succeeding clock cycle, a microcode unit determines if the microcode instruction and the directly-decoded instruction, when taken together, occupy less than or equal to the total number of issue positions available in the microprocessor. If the microcode unit determines that less than or equal to the total number of issue positions are occupied, then the packing is successful. If the microcode unit determines that greater than the total number of issue positions are occupied, then the packing is unsuccessful and the retained instruction is redispatched. Additionally, instruction dispatch selection is performed in two phases. First, a number of instructions are selected as potentially dispatchable instructions. From the potentially dispatchable instructions, a set of actually dispatched instructions may be selected based upon the success or failure of instruction packing during the previous clock cycle and whether or not packing was performed.