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:
Dec. 14, 2010
Filed:
Feb. 04, 2005
Darren M. Jones, Los Altos, CA (US);
Ryan C. Kinter, Sammamish, WA (US);
G. Michael Uhler, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Sanjay Vishin, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Darren M. Jones, Los Altos, CA (US);
Ryan C. Kinter, Sammamish, WA (US);
G. Michael Uhler, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Sanjay Vishin, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
MIPS Technologies, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Abstract
An apparatus for reducing instruction re-fetching in a multithreading processor configured to concurrently execute a plurality of threads is disclosed. The apparatus includes a buffer for each thread that stores fetched instructions of the thread, having an indicator for indicating which of the fetched instructions in the buffer have already been dispatched for execution. An input for each thread indicates that one or more of the already-dispatched instructions in the buffer has been flushed from execution. Control logic for each thread updates the indicator to indicate the flushed instructions are no longer already-dispatched, in response to the input. This enables the processor to re-dispatch the flushed instructions from the buffer to avoid re-fetching the flushed instructions. In one embodiment, there are fewer buffers than threads, and they are dynamically allocatable by the threads. In one embodiment, a single integrated buffer is shared by all the threads.