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:
Oct. 12, 1999
Filed:
Nov. 26, 1997
Jennifer-Ann M Anderson, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Jeffrey Dean, Menlo Park, CA (US);
James E Hicks, Newton, MA (US);
Carl A Waldspurger, Atherton, CA (US);
William E Weihl, San Francisco, CA (US);
Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard, MA (US);
Abstract
A method is provided for optimizing a program by inserting memory prefetch operations in the program executing in a computer system. The computer system includes a processor and a memory. Latencies of instructions of the program are measured by hardware while the instructions are processed by a pipeline of the processor. Memory prefetch instructions are automatically inserted in the program based on the measured latencies to optimize execution of the program. The latencies measure the time from when a load instructions issues a request for data to the memory until the data are available in the processor. A program optimizer uses the measured latencies to estimate the number of cycles that elapse before data of a memory operation are available.