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:
Sep. 29, 2015
Filed:
Oct. 19, 2012
Qualcomm Incorporated, San Diego, CA (US);
Melinda J. Brown, Raleigh, NC (US);
Michael William Morrow, Wilkes-Barre, PA (US);
James Norris Dieffenderfer, Apex, NC (US);
Brian Michael Stempel, Raleigh, NC (US);
Michael Scott McIlvaine, Raleigh, NC (US);
QUALCOMM Incorporated, San Diego, CA (US);
Abstract
Eliminating redundant masking operations in instruction processing circuits and related processor systems, methods, and computer-readable media are disclosed. In one embodiment, a first instruction in an instruction stream indicating an operation writing a value to a first register is detected by an instruction processing circuit, the value having a value size less than a size of the first register. The circuit also detects a second instruction in the instruction stream indicating a masking operation on the first register. The masking operation is eliminated upon a determination that the masking operation indicates a read operation and a write operation on the first register and has an identity mask size equal to or greater than the value size. In this manner, the elimination of the masking operation avoids potential read-after-write hazards and improves performance of a CPU by removing redundant operations from an execution pipeline.