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. 27, 2012
Filed:
Oct. 23, 2009
Kevin D. Kissell, Le Bar sur Loup, FR;
Kevin D. Kissell, Le Bar sur Loup, FR;
MIPS Technologies, Inc., Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
A fork instruction for execution on a multithreaded microprocessor and occupying a single instruction issue slot is disclosed. The fork instruction, executing in a parent thread, includes a first operand specifying the initial instruction address of a new thread and a second operand. The microprocessor executes the fork instruction by allocating context for the new thread, copying the first operand to a program counter of the new thread context, copying the second operand to a register of the new thread context, and scheduling the new thread for execution. If no new thread context is free for allocation, the microprocessor raises an exception to the fork instruction. The fork instruction is efficient because it does not copy the parent thread general purpose registers to the new thread. The second operand is typically used as a pointer to a data structure in memory containing initial general purpose register set values for the new thread.